


Les Misérables

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume IV [3]
Category: 19th Century CE RPF, DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, d'Artagnan Romances (Three Musketeers Series) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Metafiction, Post-Canon, Your mind: blown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-26 04:38:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6224224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gods and Monsters must unite to deal with yet another unexpected, literary menace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Through the Looking-Glass

**Gildedhorn Abbey, The Slaughters, July 1844**

The moon hung full and low over the rooftops as I opened the window to let the night air in. My skin was still damp with perspiration as I leaned over the windowsill and looked down to the fields below. Someone had been sweeping in the courtyard and whistling a popular operatic tune that had somehow traveled here from the radiant shores of Italy. I recognized it as the chorus from Verdi’s _Nabucco_.

“Come back to bed,” Aramis mewled, stretching languidly, one arm extended towards me in a gentle invitation.

“We’ve barely left the bed for nearly a decade, kitten,” I laughed, crawling back over him until my face hovered above his and I drew my nose from the top of his forehead to his lips.

“We left. That one time. To do the thing.” He turned his head to hide that he had been smiling and I snuck a kiss behind his ear.

“You’re purring, kitten,” I whispered into his hair, while my hand caressed his flank.

“I do not purr,” he protested with as much indignation as he could muster, turning away from me, yet somehow managing to get himself wrapped up in my arms.

“I can make you purr,” I muttered against the skin of his neck. “And roar like a tiger. A tyger, tyger burning bright.” We both laughed and the little scamp managed to wrap his hand around my sack in attempted retaliation.

“Who’s purring now, huh, old man?”

My cock twitched with renewed interest and I sank my teeth into the tightly corded muscle of his shoulder. Heat rose up in his body that already lay hot and languid against me, filled with my blood like an amiable man-sized mosquito. My body responded in kind, rocking against his flesh. The scent of his arousal enveloped me, rendering me dizzy with lust.

Of course, as luck would have it, it was at this precise moment that someone pounded on our door.

“Expecting someone, doctor?” I asked with a sigh of regret as his fingers unclenched.

“Me? I don’t keep visiting hours at this time of night!”

A great commotion downstairs made it apparent that Mr Grimley was losing his considerable cool, and for a moment, I wondered whether d’Artagnan had not come back to life to haunt us. In fact, I was not entirely wrong.

“Madame! Remember yourself!” my guardian shouted. “Stop! You cannot go in there!”

“Which one of us should hide?” I asked, staring at Aramis, whose hair fell about his shoulders in a magnificent display of disarray.

“What in the nine circles of Hell!” Aramis lept out of the bed and tossed me my robe, quickly throwing his own over his frame, just in the nick of time before our bed chamber door was forced open and a woman in white flowed in, followed by a frazzled Grimley, and an equally frazzled and barefooted Bartleby.

“Lights!” she commanded, and the room became illuminated by what I could have sworn were hundreds of fireflies. Upon closer examination, however, I discovered them to have been tiny women.

“Bloody fairies,” Grimley muttered, confirming my suspicions. “I don’t want them getting into the china!”

“Marion! What is the meaning of all this!” Aramis demanded, tightening his belt and smoothing down his magnificent mane. Perhaps we really hadn’t left the house in a decade, I had to allow.

“Arise, my immortal lovers,” the Dame Blanche threw herself into an arm chair even as she was ordering us to be up and at ‘em. “Something utterly horrific has happened that must be dealt with without delay.”

We had not seen her in… well, years. She had been living in Paris again, last I heard, going by some version of her own name, as was her delight and pleasure. There was a courtesan there, she had written us, who had become a very dear friend indeed. An ally. Practically a sister. I was never a very inquisitive man. Besides, I may have been otherwise occupied celebrating the Greek Independence. For a decade or so.

“Marion, you could’ve sent a letter,” I finally emitted, scratching my head. A very tiny woman was hovering uncomfortably close to my mouth, glowing. I did not know if it would be polite to shoo her away like a fly, so I moved back, only to find another one glowing into my ear. “Are these necessary?”

“Yes, you need to read this,” the fairy queen had announced motioning to a small traveling trunk she had apparently entrusted Bartleby with. “Go ahead, open it up, Bartleby.”

The leprechaun approached with his burden and unlatched the lock revealing a compilation of newspapers. Aramis and I exchanged a bewildered look.

“ _Le Siècle_? Marion, what is going on?”

“Read them, Aramis. You too, Athos. Oh, you in particular,” she grinned at me with her voracious teeth, “you will be very amused.”

Aramis had picked up the first newspaper. “What am I reading, Marion?”

“Start here,” the fairy’s white hand landed on a page. “ _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ by one Alexandre Dumas.”

“Dumas,” I muttered. “That sounds familiar. Why does that sound familiar, Aramis?”

“How should I know?” my beloved snarled, staring at the page. “I’m five hundred years old. Do you expect me to remember the name of everyone I eat?”

I was about to remind him that it wasn’t that absurd, coming from a man who had three thousand years worth of memories perfectly imprinted into his brain, when my flittermouse gasped and clutched at his breast.

“ _In the meanwhile,_ ” he read aloud, “ _since godfathers are second fathers, as it were, we beg the reader to lay to our account, and not to that of the Comte de La Fère, the pleasure or the ennui he may experience._ Athos, what the everloving _fuck_!”

I tore the paper out of his hand and skimmed the rest of the chapters like a man possessed.

“He lists us all by name!” I slapped the infuriating page.

“He even calls you a demigod, Athos,” Marion grinned again.

“D’Artagnan is his lead protagonist!” This final exclamation came from my beloved, who clutched the offending newspapers with a look of one about to go to war.

“Oh, flittermouse,” I shuddered, “I think you shall have to remember M. Dumas’ name when you eat him. We must go to Paris immediately! Grimley-”

“Already packing, Kyrios.”

“Good. Bartleby, we need a ship.”

“We do not need a ship,” Marion rose, straightening the folds of her shimmering white dress. “We shall travel from here to Glastonbury. I know a faster route to Paris.”

“You want us to travel through Faerie?” I asked with unveiled suspicion.

“Says the man who once spent five years in Tartarus?” her hand brushed against my arm and she winked at Aramis. “Don’t worry, my darlings, I will protect you from the Elf King.”

“You told her about Tartarus?” I hissed at Aramis, who shrugged at me helplessly.

“ _D’Artagnan_ ,” he whispered, nearly out of breath with rage. “D’Artagnan is the bloody _hero_ of his story, Athos.”

M. Alexandre Dumas was most definitely going to die a horrible death. Possibly his entire hereditary line as well, come to think of it, and anyone else who helped him publish that atrocity.

***

**Paris, July 1844**

“You should have left them behind in Faerie.” I toyed with the flower pinned to my bodice, picking at the wilting petals that turned to pulp between my fingers. “That would’ve served them right: being at the beck and call of the Horned God for however long he’d kept them in his realm.”

“You’ve missed them.” Marion threw me a sideways glance from beneath her lowered lashes. Her lynx eyes gleamed in the semi-darkness of the room, dark pools in her translucent face.

I tossed a torn petal at her. “I don’t miss _them_.”

“Him, then.” A sharp-edged grin slashed across her face and she moved like a serpent, burying me under her body. “You’re gagging for god-cock.” Her mouth so close to mine, and I yanked her down by her hair and bit her lip until she laughed into my mouth, breathlessly.

“It is a magnificent one.” I licked along her tongue and sucked it in.

“Worthy of being included in the collection?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe it.”

She laughed and pushed her knee between my legs that were bared to her hands and looks, as my chemise had bunched up around my waist.

“Would you like me to use it on you?” she purred as I rubbed myself against her thigh. “To thrust the massive god-cock into you, my love?”

“It is very big,” I informed her.

Marion laughed again. “What a shame he couldn’t fuck you with it.” Her hand between my legs, her palm pressing up against me as if attempting to stop the moisture dripping out and soaking the sheets. “Shame Aramis is the only one who gets to enjoy it.”

“The evil demon.” I groaned and ground down on her hand. “Tell me again, did he suffer much?”

“He certainly looked terrible when they dragged him to the guillotine,” she whispered hotly against my lips. “His skin was parchment-thin. Yellow and brittle.” I moaned and her fingers parted my heated flesh. “There were dark shadows under his eyes.” Deep within my groin, lust churned like liquid fire and a powerful wave surged towards those nimble fingers. “And I’m certain that there were grey streaks in his hair.”

“He looked hideous,” I panted.

“An old, broken man. And then,” she thrust her fingers in deeper and faster, her breath hot on my lips. “His head fell off.”

“Oh, Poseidon!” The cresting wave peaked and broke, scattering a thousand droplets of liquid lust through my entire body. “I wish I could have seen it,” I panted as soon as I got my breath back. “Did you have a good view?”

“I stood by the scaffold. My dress got spattered with his blood.”

“Mmmh…” I pulled her hand from between my legs and lifted it to my lips. “That sounds delicious,” I muttered as I began to lick her fingers clean. “Shame you had to bring him back to life so soon.”

“I couldn’t risk his head getting lost.” Marion kissed me on the cheek and stretched out by my side, while her fingers danced across my lips. “I needed an ally. You don’t know what those days were like.”

“He does make a good ally,” I conceded. “But you can’t trust him. Take it from me. Once he gets bored, or angered, he will turn against you, like a serpent that you nourished in your bosom. There’s only one to whom he is loyal and that’s-”

“Himself.”

“His god.” I smiled as a memory flashed in my mind: of Aramis, lying in my arms oh so pliant and calm, telling me about the love for his god that sustained him.

“He certainly is an immensely religious man.”

“He would have made a good Pope.” I sighed and buried my hand in Marion’s locks. “It’s a shame that fate interfered.”

“Fate?” Marion laughed and pressed her mouth to the swell of my breasts above the lace of my bodice. “Do you consider yourself an emissary of Lady Fortuna, my darling nymph? Because if I’m not entirely mistaken, it was _your_ lovely hand,” she kissed it, “that guided your lover to his doom.”

“My former lover,” I pointed out. “And I didn’t guide him anywhere, he rode headfirst into doom without my assistance. All that I did-” I sighed again, for another memory rose like a storm cloud from the recesses of my mind. “All I did was set the hellhounds on his heels to precipitate his fall.”

The hellhounds of M. Colbert. The instructions I had given him on that day had been very clear, even though I had disguised them as the wishes of the queen-mother. _If he were dead, she would not be satisfied with anything less than his head, to satisfy her he would never speak again._

 _She_ , I had said, where I’d meant _I_.

M. Colbert and his hellhounds had not brought me his head on a silver platter. It had taken one and a half centuries before his head parted company with his neck, and I had not been around to witness it.

“I _wish_ I had seen it,” I sighed wistfully, and Marion smiled against my bare skin. “But I am sorry that Athos had to die,” I admitted, and Marion’s smile morphed into a sly smirk. “The god-cock has nothing to do with it! He was _the_ most honourable man. He deserved better.”

“He’s back, and he’s happy. The demon makes him happy.”

“Yes, I believe the demon does. And yet, the demon wasn’t there when he died.”

No, the demon wasn’t there. Bragelonne lay lonely and desolate as the last comte de La Fère lay enshrined in the family tomb. I had come to speak my last adieux, for Athos had never done me any insult or injury. Even through the fog of wrath that clogged my mind, I felt that he was not to blame for suffering the misfortune of loving the spawn of hell.

The chapel was silent and cold. When I stumbled in, carried on the wings of the cold eastern wind like an autumn leaf, it was like stepping into the petrified heart of a long-dead behemoth. In the corner, a crouching cat growled at me from above its feast of… “Raoul,” I whispered. “Oh my poor boy.”

The tears that had not flown before broke the dam, and I sank to my knees at the shrine of the only god whom I’d ever loved. I wept for him, that beautiful, noble man, with my handkerchief pressed to my face.

The sound of footsteps on the gravel alerted me to the presence of another. I raised my tear-stained face and beheld-

“M. d’Artagnan!”

“You!” replied the captain of the musketeers in a stern voice. “You here! Oh, Madame, I should better have liked to read your letter of condolence in the mansion of the Comte de La Fère. You would have wept less writing it. And so would I!”

I steadied myself with a hand at the tomb as I rose to face the human. “Monsieur,” I said, choking on a lingering sob.

“For it was you,” added that pitiless friend of the immortals, “it was you who sped those men to the grave.”

“Oh, spare me-” your sanctimonious drivel, I was going on to say, but he’d cut me off, with the Gascon spirit and verve that I had so often heard spoken about.

“God forbid, Madame, that I should offend a woman, or that I should make her weep in vain. But I must say that the place of the murderer is not upon the grave of her victim.” With his customary cunning, he must have wheedled out from some minion of M. Colbert whose plan it had been to send the bloodthirsty pack after Aramis and Porthos, and it had not escaped his shrewd judgment that the blame for the deaths that followed had to be lain at my door.

“Excuse me?” I was too amazed to come up with anything more eloquent. Aramis had not exaggerated at all: the Gascon was a rude asshole. Accosting a crying woman at the grave of the man for whom she wept – I would not have thought it possible that any man with the pretensions to a gentleman could ever commit such heinous offence.

This time, however, the noble, chivalrous captain of the musketeers had miscalculated. The woman he thus abused was not a smitten laundress or grisette, nor a guilt-ridden, heartbroken damsel in distress, willing to bend her head and writhe in shame under the hailstorm of his words. It was a nymph and a duchess who faced him in the dim chapel, by the tomb that held the body of the man whom she had loved. Why, oh why could it not be the body of the other? Decaying slowly in the confinement of his coffin, the way he did in his darkest dreams?

I took a step towards the Gascon and looked him straight in the eye. It was easy enough, for he was not much taller than me. And then, before he could throw another abuse at me, I hitched up my skirts and kicked him square in the balls.

I stepped over his wormlike form and didn’t look back. Now that I knew d’Artagnan was in Bragelonne, I had to act quickly: Athos’ memoirs, and the casket of papers of whose contents I knew nothing, apart from the fact that it had to be kept away from mortal eyes. My own life was drawing to an end – courtesy of Aramis – but my Bourbon cousin would find a way to keep them safe on one of the estates in Normandy or Picardy over which her family kept watch.

“So you are partly to blame for the story of their adventures leaking out,” Marion had said with some satisfaction when I first recounted the Bragelonne episode to her. “That is rather amusing. And then you didn’t even appear in the book – the ultimate insult!”

“I played an important part behind the scenes of the story,” I shrugged. “The name of Madame de Chevreuse was infamous enough, no need to add to the notoriety by making her a character in a popular novel.”

“It’s not like you could be recognised,” Marion said. “Even if you insist on calling yourself Marie in each new incarnation.”

“That’s rich, coming from the woman who calls herself Marion de Lorme wherever she goes,” I said pointedly. “Was the latest caper really necessary? Could you not have asked M. de Vigny to come up with a different name for your character when he put you into his _Cinq-Mars_? You really should change your name once in a while, don’t you think, chérie?”

“Says the woman who named herself after the most iconic man in the history of France – who, incidentally, also happened to be my lover.”

“Your dead lover, dear.”

“Aren’t they all?”

***

**Paris, July 1844**

Summer in Paris assaulted my senses and infused my soul with panic. How many times would I arrive in this city on the heels of some disaster, to precipitate or prevent another? I had instructed Grimley to find lodgings far away from St. Sulpice.

I sat in Marion’s carriage as it trotted along the cobbled streets, willfully blind to the changes of the times outside. The air still smelled of linden trees, but they no longer had quite as much human excrement to strive against. I read the serialized novel, not turning my head to peek outside the carriage window even whilst it traveled through Faerie. I lifted my eyes up once when the sound of preternatural music surrounded the carriage and a tall figure in a crown of silver antlers loomed just out the periphery of my eye.

_I will protect you from the Elf King, my darlings._

My hand clutched Aramis then, whose look had also been unreadable. He had checked my progress in Dumas’ despicable novel, and averted his eyes towards the infamous boy-thief, if that had indeed been him.

I finished the last issue of _Le Siècle_ and tossed it aside. Everything stifled me. I wanted out of Marion’s carriage.

“My friend, you look very pale,” the fairy said in a surprisingly gentle voice.

Indeed, my hand clutched at the door, my mind mapping out my escape from the suddenly overwhelming confinement. All those memories. Paris. _Aramis._

_Aramis, after a journey into Lorraine, disappeared all at once, and ceased to write to his friends; they learned at a later period through Mme. de Chevreuse, who told it to two or three of her intimates, that, yielding to his vocation, he had retired into a convent--only into which, nobody knew._

That’s what the novel had claimed, only he and I knew that wasn’t exactly what had happened.

“I need to… I have to get out,” I muttered, extricating my hand from his grasp. _And when had he actually taken my hand?_

“Not yet,” Marion’s fingers rested on my knee, her eyes broaching no argument. “We must speak of the situation at hand.”

“You, Madame, need not be involved in this,” I replied, my mouth feeling full of brine. “Aramis and I are perfectly capable of taking care of this _author_ ourselves.”

“This is a delicate matter, gentlemen,” the Dame Blanche admonished us. “Not only do we have to snuff this M. Dumas, we must first find out how he knew what he knew. The events described in the book are accurate, no?”

“Only too accurate,” Aramis ground his teeth. “At times, they are recounted quite verbatim.”

“How would he know those things?” I frowned. “Unless…”

“Unless?” Marion and Aramis fixed me with anxious gazes.

“Unless he somehow got a hold of my memoirs. My _actual_ memoirs?” I turned to my lover with a sense of desperation. “Aramis, when I… Everything was left in Bragelonne.”

“There is no way it would have survived the Revolution,” my beloved shrugged.

“You were there,” I clasped his arm. “Tell me you destroyed everything and didn’t let it lie about for a century and a half!”

“I had other things on my mind,” Aramis said, blanching like the very satin of Marion’s dress.

“Is it possible?” I could not believe it. “Did that little _shit_ somehow get a hold of my memoirs, and then had the _gall_ to admit that he used my memoirs while _pretending_ to be an author of an entirely original work?” It made one's head spin, such human duplicity.

The three of us exchanged a look. “I’m going to eat him over the course of a week,” Aramis declared.

“Well, he’s certainly corpulent enough to be made a feast of for days,” Marion shrugged, unmoved by this pronouncement. “And you know, he didn’t write it alone. He has a collaborator. An Auguste Maquet.”

“Great. I’ll eat them both,” Aramis stated plainly and cast his eyes out the carriage window.

“We must learn the extent and source of their knowledge,” Marion insisted.

“They clearly knew, but chose not to expose us,” Aramis muttered. “He made the human his hero,” his face wrinkled, “and there is no mention of anything supernatural. Not blatantly.”

“And yet, it’s all in there,” I shook my head. “Anyone doing a careful analysis of this… _manuscript_ would see. The references to Greek myths and demonology. The inexplicable time skips. People having information they ostensibly were not privy to.The completely nonsensical on the surface murder of a woman.” Bile rose up in my gullet. “My god, Aramis, those were the worst years of our lives. How can we let it stand?”

“The public loves it,” Marion fanned herself languidly. “Dumas is adapting it for the stage. He’s even writing a prelude, I'm told.”

“I’m going to be sick,” I stated.

“You do not get sick, my love,” Aramis’ hand rested over my shoulder. I turned my head, and his black eyes pierced me to the very core of my soul. Marion was watching us, but I suddenly found myself very much not giving a damn, and I leaned towards him, pressing our mouths together.

Those were the worst years of our lives. But we somehow survived them. Well, one of us did, anyways. Regardless - this… we would survive this too.

M. Dumas would be at the salon of comtesse d’Agoult that night and there we would follow him, it was decided. Aramis had ways of getting sinners to offer up their sins to the confessional of his gleaming teeth and I could always rely on my Discord powers to activate in case it turned out this Frenchman too had been running around with hunters, like his British forebearers.

The streets of Paris were lively again. The diaphanous fashion of the Empire had gone out of style and women once again resembled delectable cakes while men had the option of attiring oneselves like dandies. It did not have quite the baroque opulence of the seventeenth century, but it was lavish enough to confuse the senses, and for a moment, I felt quite out of time again. Aramis’ hand pressed against my lower back, steering me up the stairs and into the illuminated salon of some socialite or another, where the reigning artist of the day would be expected to hold court.

“Well, there he is. Tomorrow’s lunch and dinner.” Aramis stood with his gloved hands folded behind his erect back.

“But not tonight’s?” I smiled at him, moving to place myself so that I too could make out our quarry through the crowd.

“Tonight - we reconnoiter.”

“Do you think you can hold yourself back, sweet kitten? That man has turned your nemesis into a figure of dashing chivalry and charm.”

“Are you actually _attempting_ to enrage me, you deviant?” Aramis pressed against me and I had to duck out of his way for fear that we might scandalize all of polite society then and there. We hadn’t been in public for too long, it seemed. “Besides,” Aramis purred into my ear as my eyes finally fixated on that M. Dumas, “nemesis - that implies a certain common goal and mutual respect. I believe the word you were looking for was _nuisance_.”

“Aramis, whom does that man resemble to you?” I asked, temporarily deaf to his seductive tones.

“A snack.”

“No, but _look_. Not what - _whom_.”

“I don’t understand. What are you saying?” Aramis narrowed his eyes, standing next to me to behold the man who was clearly in the midst of some kind of bloviation. He threw back his head and laughed lustily, rather enamoured of his own (probably stolen) joke.

“That… that hair. That face. That _laughter_. Doesn’t he remind you of someone you and I both know?”

“Perhaps, but… Porthos?”

We looked at each other and took a frightened step back, away from the crowd.

“What did you tell me was the name that Porthos went by when he was palling about with that Saint-Georges fellow?” I asked.

“Thomas-Alexandre something something…”

“Something something _Dumas_?” I pressed.

“Hera’s cunt!” Aramis exclaimed and clasped his own hand over his mouth. I dragged him off to the side, in the direction of the wardrobe.

“Dumas Davy de Pailleterie,” Aramis whispered. “ _Yes_. You’re right. He would be about the right age, too. That little shit over there…”

“Is the son of Porthos,” we both choked out, with horror.


	2. Our Mutual Friend

**Troy, 1184 BC**

Sing me, O Muse, of the fall of the house of Priam!

Among the burning cinders of Troy, the demigod slept, his head upon the breast of a goddess and wrapped up in the obsidian veil of her wings. The wails of mourners and the moans of the dying lulled Eris. At last, audacious Troy had fallen, but the Gods still had their part to play. They each had their favorites, after all.

Athos stirred from her arms, roused by screams, ire flashing in his eyes as he pulled the whelp of Achilles off some helpless, crying girl.

“Is this how you honor your father’s memory?” His voice, deep now, like their own Father’s sonorous baritone, echoing in the blood-splattered halls.

The girl fled.

He had watched the son of Deidamia slaughter Priam the night before at the feet of their Father’s altar (an unspeakable insult!), but at least the old man had been a man. Now, his hand clutched the whelp’s collar and his fist rose over him, ready to smite, like one of Zeus’ thunderbolts.

“Let him go, brother,” Eris commanded, her arm extended to stop the demigod from killing the one they called Pyrrhus.

Athos turned to her, leaving the bloodthirsty child to claim his next victim, while Troy burned on around them.

“Odysseus sailed to Skyros to retrieve him,” the demigod hissed through his teeth. “Like he had retrieved Achilles years before. But he is _nothing_ like Achilles!”

“Like he had once retrieved you, as well,” her voice was soft as her lips brushed against the warrior’s earlobe. His body was still radiating the fever of battle as well as the heat of their love-making. She had given herself to him, for he had stood victorious, but it was time to take her due. “You will not sail back with the rest of the Greeks,” Eris said, her nails leaving four angry, red trails in their wake as she clutched at his lower back.

“What would you have me do? Stay here, among the ashes of the fallen?”

“No, foolish man,” she spoke into his mouth, in between kisses. “You are coming with me, to Olympus.” His eyes were pools of desire muddled by sudden confusion. His body pressed up against hers and a broken pillar buttressed them both. What would they look like to a passerby, she wondered, a mere mortal who could not see her?

“Olympus, sister?” he whispered. “That’s a long way from home.”

“Trust me, Athos,” she reached beneath his chiton to feel the reassuring hardness there. He was hers, hers for the taking. “You will reach home faster if you come with me than if you go with your King to Ithaca.”

“Why? What will you do to Odysseus?”

“Me? Nothing. You forget, my darling, that the Gods have all picked their sides in this war. It may be over here, but you cannot fight destiny. No one can.”

Her wings folded around him again, this time to hide him from those who might stray by. Their foreheads touched. The demigod held his breath and when he exhaled the smell of smoke had vanished.

“Come with me, Athos. There is nothing for you here.”

“To Olympus?” he bit his lip in uncertainty. “But how?”

“Easily enough,” Discord whispered into his ear, turning him about, “In our brother’s chariot.”

The sound of a thousand swords clashing brought the demigod to his knees. The horses reared and stomped the blood-soaked sand, and there, at their reigns, with his golden helmet and cloak, rose the God of War.

“Ares,” the demigod’s heart echoed the beat of a wardrum. He hung his head in obeisance and over the top of his kneeling form, Discord and War exchanged a smile.

“You’ve done well, brother,” the God of War spoke and reached out his hand. “Come now, not all Heroes must wait until Elysium to reap their just rewards.”

Athos rose from his knees and placed his hand into the gleaming palm of Ares. The brothers locked eyes and with a gentle push of Discord’s wing, Athos found himself propelled into the chariot. His head spun, his hand clutched at the reins in Ares’ hand.

“Wait.”

“What is it, brother?” Eris purred into his ear.

“What about Yorgas?”

“Your Grigori?” Ares laughed. “Isn’t the whole reason for a Grigori to protect you from Mother’s wrath?” Eris too laughed, enjoying a private and arcane joke with her twin.

“You don’t need him anymore, Athos. _We_ will protect you now,” she said.

“Do you not love us?” Ares’ breath scalded like lava against the skin of Athos’ neck.

“Do you not trust us?” Eris’ breasts pressed through her armor against his chest.

His breath halted, his body trembled with an onslaught of waves of desire as he found himself pressed between the gods, his blood boiled and wanted only to be commanded. _To battle Achaeans!_

“I do,” the demigod said. “I do.”

***

**Paris, July 1844**

A curse upon the Old Ones! A curse upon the Ancient Deities! A curse upon the Titan cock!

The Titanic spawn, _Alexandre_ – oh how Tyche must have giggled at the excellent joke of Porthos’ thousandth-born being named after the lover who broke Athos’ heart – the thief who had stolen the story of our lives and made _d’Artagnan_ its hero, staggered drunkenly through the streets of Paris, unaware that death slithered in his wake.

Tonight, he would live. I was in no hurry. We had to find out through which channels he had spread his knowledge before we wiped him from the face of the Earth. I licked my lips thinking of the feast ahead. Even twice diluted, his Titan blood would be sweet and potent. Once, I had drunk from Porthos’ veins – a gift freely given by a friend that sustained me through an attack of the mal de mer. His son’s blood would be torn from him, taken against his will by a creature of the night whose wrath he had incurred.

The rotund form of Porthos’ bastard tottered merrily around a corner and ducked through a door. I had hunted him down in his lair- Ah, no. In the next moment, sound and smell assaulted my senses as he pissed in the doorway, humming an operatic tune under his breath. He took his time tucking himself back in, and then staggered on, a jolly “Oomp-pa, oomp-pa, oomp-pa-pa” on his lips.

So much _life_. He was not a warrior, the mortal who steered me through the streets of Paris, and yet he was brimming over with a lifeforce that I did not wholly attribute to his Titanic provenance. Lust and verve and vigour spiced his blood, as much as wine did at present. I could smell them even now, even as I slunk several paces behind him, black and silent like his shadow. My tongue prickled, my fangs tingled and inside my skull the silver thread unravelled that tied me to my prey and reeled me in.

I had drunk no-one’s blood but Athos’ for a long time. It had sustained me in our retreat, whereas my immortal lover did not require food nor drink to survive. There was a period – days perhaps, perhaps weeks – when we had barred the door to our bedchamber and I had fed on nothing but him for days, while he didn’t feed at all. Deprived of water, his blood grew torpid and viscous, like a stream dried by the summer sun, and Athos languished in my arms, suspended between this world and the other. When I bit through his skin, it broke under the pressure of my teeth readily, but the nectar within trickled out reluctantly, like stale syrup. It wasn’t enough to extinguish the devouring fire in my veins, and so I reached for my syringe case. I pushed the needle into his femoral artery and he spread his thighs for me. I watched the dark gelatinous liquid fill the glass tube. I withdrew the needle from his leg and pushed it in the crook of my elbow. My vein swelled as divine blood distended it. Pain stabbed through my arm and I cried out, and then – an explosion of light and of energy, Zeus’ own thunderbolt surging through my blood vessels and burning me from within. Fire raged in my flesh and my mind, the warmth of Athos’ body, his arms around me, his hot, dry breath on my skin – I might have dreamt them all. For when I woke, he lay on the bed, while I lay on the floor, and Grimley stood by his side with a pitcher of water in his hand and shrouded in the air of Olympian disapproval as if in the mantle of Discord.

Where was he now, my God of Discord, who had set out to stalk a different prey? My own quarry exchanged salutations with other late-night stragglers, and then, at last: the house. The concierge at the door let him in. She would have let me in just as easily, but there was no need. I knew where he lived. I knew where he would die.

With exquisite politeness, I addressed the woman who guarded the door like a toothless Cerberus. She would know about M. Dumas’ connections, and she would gladly share her knowledge with the charming young man who smiled at her with all his teeth.

***

Cousin Porthos, it appeared, was not only a father, but a grandfather as well. As if Dumas _père_ was not nuisance enough, his adult son presented another potential leak that needed to be quelled at the source. Paris was veritably hemorrhaging with fruit of Porthosian loins, and they had a knack for dabbling in what should not concern them.

Following the young Dumas’ steps, I arrived at a house on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, and found myself in a lively salon. Men and women flitted through the rooms like a throng of butterflies. Mostly men, I noted. The swarm seemed to have one focal point, and to that focal point the young Alexandre plowed a path through the crowd, drawn like a moth to the flame.

What did he know? How much had Porthos’ spawn told him? How far has this madness disseminated while Aramis and I celebrated the Greek Independence in the Cotswolds?

I followed in his wake, keeping to the shadows as much as I could, not having a natural propensity for it like my flittermouse. Still, hiding in plain sight had always worked for me.

In the middle of a throng of men, which Dumas _fils_ had approached, sat a diminutive vision of loveliness. Her dark hair cascaded from her head in perfectly styled tendrils to brush her exposed white shoulders, and her deeply set blue eyes were simultaneously amused yet wise beyond her years. Her mouth was small, well-shaped, and curved into the kind of smile that made every man in that room suspect it was meant only for him. There was no mistaking it: I was in the presence of a courtesan.

The young Dumas kissed the beauty’s hand and, by the small movement of her head and an incline of her neck, I surmised they had been quite intimate acquaintances. The courtesan turned and laughed at something another one of her many admirers said and her hand swayed in a mechanical movement, a sweeping motion of her fan, and my heart fluttered. If it was possible to recognize one’s lover by the motion of her fan then the sensual brunette on the Boulevard de la Madeleine could be no other than the Rohan nymph.

My lips parted around a silent gasp and then our eyes met.

It was not possible. Marie de Rohan had died and her mortal body had turned to water. And yet, the woman in the sedan appeared as startled as I was. It was evident, she had recognized me.

Her arm moved deliberately as she fanned herself, slowly, as if her fan was a giant wing of a white swan.

“Pardon me, my dears,” she spoke, rising with her hand on young Dumas’ shoulder. “I just remembered I told Laure to wait for me in the library. The poor dear girl must have fallen asleep!” she laughed, tossing back her hair. “I will return shortly. Do not dry out of jokes without me, gentlemen!”

She attempted to extricate herself when the grandson of Porthos carelessly let his hands rest about her waist.

“Are you really leaving, Marie?”

“No one likes an ardent lover in public, chéri,” she smiled only with her eyes, and caressed his face with her fan, effectively moving him out of her way.

_Marie_. Marie, he had called her. Marie? Had the reckless nymph really no sense of self-preservation?

A barely perceptible movement of her head invited me to follow, and I detached myself from her circle of adoration, silent and unobserved. My eyes were glued to her back as she walked, still as proud as a queen in the body of a courtesan. Her voluminous skirts whispered like waves against the parquet. She led me into a small but brimming library and turned, assuming an almost warlike stance, one hand resting against her corsetted hip. Her breasts heaved beneath the camellias on her bodice. She was, as ever, a goddess.

“You!” her voice bespoke of equal parts rage and surprise. “What nerve, showing up at my house! And while you're still living with that vile abomination!”

I took a step towards her. “Forgive me,” I said and mindlessly, like a man possessed, reached out for her.

“Athos, be prudent!” she squealed, her diminutive form pressed against my body as I took her in my arms.

She looked different, she even smelled different. But underneath the heady odor of camellias, I could still sense the distinct currents of the Loire. She was still… “Marie,” I sighed and pressed my mouth against hers.

This was it - the moment so long denied to us. Her lips were soft and pliant against my own and her form molded into my embrace while I felt her heart imitate a hummingbird inside her chest. Her tongue brushed against mine and I tasted the coolness of the fluvial tides inside her. A sigh escaped her lips and kissed the back of my throat.

“Oh…,” she whispered with her eyes still closed, “... Poseidon…”

My forehead was pressed against hers while I hovered near, my mouth still sucking on her lower lip. “Marie…”

“The curse,” she muttered, her hand resting against my heart.

“It’s been broken,” I replied, breathlessly, my arms still around her waist.

“Hera has forgiven you?”

 “Not a bit. I killed my sister.”

She graced me with a quizzical look and then straightened out before me like a string that had been tightened. Woozy no more, the spell had been broken. “I thought you were truly dead,” she finally said, finding her voice and pushing me away with one small, but pointed hand. “I… mourned your passing.”

“I was,” I could not very well deny it.

“And Aramis, I heard he'd had gone feral and lost his head.”

“He’s better now.”

“Hm,” she sneered, unconvinced. “One would have to see it to believe it.”

“He’s changed, Marie,” I tried to intercede. “What of you? This,” I pointed to her camellias, “is beneath you.”

“How _dare_ you?” she hissed. “ _Your_ revenant,” she snapped her fan opened and closed. “It was all his fault that I have sunk, _if_ you find me so sunken.”

“Whatever did you do to him, Marie?”

She was fuming, eyes firing thunderbolts to rival those my Father dispensed, her body tense and coiled like an ornate cobra. “So! He didn’t tell you. Of course not - how typical! Good to see some things never change.”

“I know what he did to you,” I conceded, remembering the entire fiasco with the Bourbon twin. “And, I confess, I did not approve. But I don’t know what you quarrelled over to bring his fury upon yourself.”

“That fiend!” she spat out. “I should not have underestimated his jealous streak.” I smiled and lowered myself into one of the library chairs. “You’re different,” she suddenly said, looking me up and down. “What’s changed about you?”

I was about to reply, when the library doors swung open and young Dumas appeared in the doorway, pale and looking as if he would have challenged me to a duel, except he had never held a weapon more powerful than his quill.

“Marie,” he pronounced, casting suspicious glances between the two of us. “You have not returned to your guests.”

“Really?” I addressed her in Greek. “You’re fucking the grandson of Porthos?”

“You more than anyone should appreciate,” the saucy nymph replied, “he’s got the cock of a Titan.” Then she turned towards the aspiring author, all smiles and vocal caresses, “Darling, this is the comte…”

“De Perregaux,” I supplied.

“The comte de Perregaux, a good friend of mine, quite ancient friend really,” she beamed and I wanted to tumble her on the floor right then and there. “And this is my _very_ dear friend Alexandre Dumas,” she introduced the grandson of my cousin and scion of his mighty tentacle.

“The famous author of _Les Trois Mousquetaires_?” I asked, with feigned innocence. “Oh no, that was the comte de La Fère, n’est-ce pas?” I laughed at my own hilarious joke while Marie blanched and then flushed and fanned herself with a militant air. So, at least one of my questions had been answered: the grandson knew nothing. The nymph, however, oh, chances were she held the answers to quite a bit.

“That particular Dumas is my father, Monsieur,” the young Titan-in-the-making replied.

“Wickedly talented man!” I supplied, winking apart at Marie, who berated me louder in looks than Aramis had ever done in words. “I’d love to pick his brain sometimes about some of that material. How does one even come up with such things? Such boundless imagination! Don’t you agree, Madame?”

“Do be a dear and give me a few more minutes alone with the count, chéri?” Marie batted her eyelashes at the poor lad, and he departed, flustered and flabbergasted. When the door closed behind him, she turned towards me, “You can tell Aramis to bite me.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“This country isn’t big enough for the two of us,” she went on.

“Whatever he may have done, he has paid for it,” I responded. “Besides, haven’t you caused enough trouble by telling humans what he is? The entire continent is overrun with these _hunters_ ,” I said with disgust. “And need I remind you, I _died_ because of your little quarrel, Marie! I spent a century and a half sitting on the stygian shores, waiting for Aramis to be cogent enough to resurrect me. Forgive him and let us three be friends again.”

“Never!”

I rose out of the chair. “The last woman who tried to go up against us was a goddess too, and she is _quite_ extinct.”

“Are you threatening me, Athos?”

“Marie, I…” I sighed and fought back my innate instinct for causing discord. “I loved you once. I wish you would have come to me, so I could have protected you.”

“It is too late for that.”

“Thank the gods, it isn’t too late.”

Her mouth was drawn but crimson where she had bitten it. “I loved Aramis once too,” she finally spoke. “But the viper I had suckled at my own bosom had turned on me.”

I retook my seat and let my head rest in my hands for a few moments while I gathered my thoughts. Her perfume, her natural beauty, seeing her again after all this time, even in a new body, it all made my head spin quite out of control.

“Please,” I finally rose from the chair, “hear me, Marie. You know I never wished you harm. We live in a world where those of us who have divine blood are too rare, and our friendship is too precious to waste. It is us versus them, Marie. We cannot afford to fight amongst ourselves. Your friend, the dancing fairy… Marion… understood that.”

“Marion had always been too impractical,” Marie huffed, fanning herself in that way which spoke of impending surrender.

“You are a goddess living in a world which has overthrown gods,” I reminded her, taking her hand in mine. “Let me protect you. Let me take you away from these people, who do not deserve you and who cannot love you the way that is your due.”

A shadow passed over her face. Perchance a memory. Too many fleeting emotions for me to capture. She reached into her bodice and tore off one of the camellias.

“Bring it back when it has wilted,” she told me. “We’ll talk then.”

“Tomorrow?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” she replied, and floated out the library doors like the ephemeral vision she had always seemed to me.

***

Athos was home when I returned to our rooms in the Hôtel de Rohan-Guémené. The Place Royale had been renamed Place des Vosges in 1800, which had upset Athos. “Republic, pah!” he had muttered, but had not objected to taking lodgings in the old seat of the Rohan family when Grimley led us to our new residence, smirking.

He was sitting by the open window with a glass of wine in his hand and a half empty bottle on the table. “There you are, flittermouse,” he said, with a languid glance from beneath his long lashes. “I missed you.”

“We only were parted for a few hours.” I was feeling quite contrary. There was something unsettling about that calm; it reminded me of the frozen lake of the old Parisian days.

He smiled and reached out to me. “Kiss me?”

His lips parted beneath mine, and his tongue was acerbic with wine. As I straddled him, I sensed something… something underlying that taste, something different, and I sucked in his tongue to sample the flavour, but the scent of camellias drowned out everything else.

“Why the flower, Athos?” I nipped at his lower lip. “Did Plagiarist the Younger give it to you?”

He was smiling again, looking up at me with eyes like dark stars. “Tell me first what you’ve found out, Aramis, and then it’s my turn.”

“I found out where he lives.”

“I expected nothing less.”

“His partner in crime Maquet works for the _Revue des deux mondes_. We can find him through the publisher.”

“A snack for chyortik.”

I did not smile.

“He has children. How many, nobody knows.”

“He truly is his father’s son.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is that a problem, Athos?”

“Is it not?”

“Porthos has fathered more children than I have eaten men. He never cared for this one. He left him and the good ladywife behind and went off to war. Why should he care now, forty years later? The human’s life is drawing to an end anyway.”

“He is one-quarter Titan, his lifespan might be longer than other humans’.”

“Does that matter, Athos? You know what he did. Men – poets – had died for less.”

“He is Porthos’ son.”

“Porthos doesn’t know that. He isn’t aware of his existence.”

“We must tell him.”

I slumped and sank into his arms, one of which tightened around my back. The other moved, as he was pouring himself another glass of wine.

“Why, Athos?” I whispered into his shoulder. “Because it is the honourable thing to do?”

“Yes.” He drank. “You know it is, Aramis.”

“Why,” I ground out, clenching my hands into fists. “Why do you have to be so honourable?”

“That is who I am.” He kissed my hair and pulled me closer. “And that is why, Aramis, I won’t keep anything from you.”

In his arms, my body went rigid. The odour of camellias was suddenly so much stronger, clinging to his clothes and skin.

“What won’t you keep from me?” I knew it even before he spoke the words.

“Marie,” he breathed and I tasted blood, for my fangs had dropped and sliced my lip open. The lake of ice opened, freezing waters rushed into my skull and my veins. “She’s alive.”

“Not for long,” I growled and my body clenched and tightened above him, around him, I was squeezing him with my thighs even as my mouth assailed the throbbing vein in his neck. The clank of broken glass as it dropped from his fingers and crashed to the floor. “Did you tell her that?”

His hand in my hair, and he was holding me in place as I tore through his skin and tendons with ease. His blood was spiced with something more than wine, and I growled into the wound, clenching my jaw until he hissed in pain and his body went rigid beneath me.

“Aramis!” he gasped. “I know she hurt you.” He was speaking very quickly. “But angel, isn’t it time to let it go? You had your revenge. Whatever she may have done, she has paid for it.”

I lifted my head and stared at him. Blood dripped from my mouth onto his white cravat and the collar of his shirt. “How can you say that?”

“Flitterm-”

I slapped him. The wound in his neck was a well of bubbling pitch, black in candlelight. His eyes gleamed golden: I recognised the flame of Discord.

“What did you do, Athos?” I spoke through clenched teeth. “Did you introduce your dead sister-lover to your mistress? Did you show her your Achaean armour?”

“I did not.” He had let go of me with one hand and was pressing it against his neck. Dark rivulets trickled out between his long, pale fingers. Blood finds a way.

“She-” He hesitated, a victim of his own truthfulness. “She’s the mistress of Porthos’ grandson.”

I showed him my teeth in a snarl. Between our bodies, heat rose. Even through our clothes, the warmth, the scent of his skin, the hardness between his thighs or mine, scalded me. Inside me: the terrible cold of battle, and I shivered.

“I don’t care whom she fucks.”

A smirk, heathen and insolent. “You did, once.” He thrust his hips into me.

I drove into him with my talons and fangs. But he was strong, my God of Discord. My mouth might have been clamped to his neck, tearing it open on the other side, but he moved with the savage grace of a pagan god and lifted us both off the chair. I clung to him, and he threw me down, onto the carpet, beneath his body, and we were panting as our hands tore at each other’s clothes.

I had tasted the nymph on his tongue. It was she who had stirred his blood tonight. I had tasted the tang of Loire waters and he would pay for it. My hand between his legs, rougher and harder than necessary, but he did not complain. His groan was not one of pain, and I bit down harder on his neck; the cravat long discarded, his skin, his very flesh exposed. We had rolled across the room, pawing at each other as fabric tore under our ravenous hands. His cock throbbed in my fist, my cock throbbed between his thighs, and his chest was slick with sweat and blood.

“On your knees,” I snarled into his flesh. Athos barked out a laugh and peeled himself off me. He flipped me over with ease and pinned me down with his body.

“My beautiful boy.” His voice trickled into my ear and melted the coldness in my brain until I cried out. One hand on the back of my neck, parting my legs with his knees, and then his fingers, slippery and firm inside me. “I love you so much, you know that, don’t you?”

Ire ravaged my breast, and my heart swelled at Athos’ words. The pressure escaped in a half-sob, half-groan, as he pulled me up by my hips and thrust the tip of his cock in. My spine curved, my back arched, and I was splaying myself before him, even as rage churned and my blood pumped in time with his.

“Come here, kitten.” One hand wrapped around my hip, he was pulling me closer, and his thick cock spread me with agonising slowness. He rubbed his groin against my arse when he was fully sheathed, hot skin and damp hairs, burning and chafing my flesh like his words had burned and chafed my soul.

He took his time, fucking me in slow, methodical thrusts, with roving hands and a hot, filthy mouth that prayed a litany into my ear and into my skin. By the time his hips snapped forward and his cock swelled and twitched inside me, I had long spent myself, panting into my forearm, gnawing at the encrusted blood that had dried on my own skin.

“She’s a courtesan,” Athos whispered as he lay curled around me, one arm around my chest, fingertips stroking my skin, the other stretched out over my head. “Aramis. You loved her once. Remember our Parisian days? Remember how you loved her and how I resented and hated her? Let us not repeat the same mistake now, with our roles reversed. Let us learn from the past. Please.”

A courtesan: the Rohan nymph no longer. She had not been born into this life, she had carved it out for herself, like water carves out a cave in the rock. My ire was by no means quenched, even though it lay dormant now that my body was sated, but my curiosity was roused: what other ways did she know, the water witch, to become flesh and live among humans?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Hump Day and/or the Ides of March (depending on where you are)!


	3. A Long Fatal Love Chase

**Paris, July 1844**

She was smaller than before. Much younger too. Different, yet same. Fluvial in her need to intermingle with me, and my body enveloped hers. My mouth, striving to be everywhere at once, clung to her, with my tongue and with my teeth. My lips need to take, to feel, to _taste_. That taste, so familiar, yet new. Around me, _inside_ me.

The softness of her body. The way it curved up and against me. Into my hands. Against my chest. Warm and pliant against my cock. Skin like the softest velvet, like making love in a stream, slippery rocks, water sweet with spring freshness. 

I had not held a woman this way since… since...

Her small hands, clinging to my shoulder blades while I sucked on her lips and let my fingers explore the wetness between her thighs. She trembled and my mouth swallowed her pleasure moan.

“Slow down, my divine lover,” she panted against my ear. “We have all night.”

“Marie,” my hand forced her face up by the chin and I pressed my mouth to her white, swan-like neck, longer even in this new incarnation, and somehow all the more avian. “You must recall that a part of you has been living inside me this whole time. You cannot blame me for feeling an unstoppable desire to merge with you.”

“And I with you,” her nails scraped along the nape of my neck. “My beautiful son of Zeus, so godly in every aspect.”

“But I’m happy to take my time with you, my enchanting nymph,” I slid down her body again, joyful to be allowed to place my tongue where only my gloved fingers were allowed to trail before. “If that is your wish.”

Her body was a bowed string as I buried my head between her legs, taking her wet and pulsating sex into my mouth, letting my tongue explore her with renewed vigor.

“Athos!” her fingers clutching my hair. “I will finish!”

“So do,” I nuzzed my face against her inner thigh, my mouth wet from the essence of the rivers, “You said it yourself - we have all night.”

She had been on top of me, riding me, her channel hot and pulsating around my cock as she drove me deeper and higher into herself, like a magnificent valkyrie. My hands trembled as they clutched at her thighs and left bruises there that I would kiss at dawn before taking my leave of her. Beads of perspiration pearled along her breasts and dripped from her forehead, landing with a hiss on my own heated skin. 

I slammed my hips harder into her and pulled her down by her long tresses until I could kiss her keening mouth raw. 

“I worship at the altar of Discord,” she panted into my mouth, collapsing over me as we both descended from the Olympus of hours of glorious, unbridled fucking.

“Do you, nymph?” I smiled into her loosened, dark curls. “You always had been an adherent of Discord, haven’t you?” My hands still had the strength to scoop up the globes of her pert ass and flip us both over onto her sweat and sex-soaked sheets. She laughed and let me draw her closer, back into my arms, so that I could breathe her in once again, like one drinks in the first rays of the rising sun. My chest pressed against her breasts, the simple union of our bodies being allowed this, this _closeness_ we had always been denied. “I love you,” I whispered against the top of her head. It had flowed out of me, as if I too had become a river.

“You had never said so before,” she murmured and lifted her sapphire blue eyes towards mine. Her delicate fingers brushed my hair out of my face and drew lines over the skin of my cheekbones.

“It does not make it any less true,” I said, closing my eyes and inhaling her scent again.

“You love Aramis,” she reminded me, rather needlessly. I sighed. I should have known we would end up speaking of Aramis, after all.

“That is an indelible truth, one that I am powerless against. He is part of me. He _is_ me.”

“He too is Alexander?” She toyed with me. “You said earlier, I had been a part of you as well.” She smiled, that coy smile of a courtesan, the smile she used to hide her emotions from everyone else. 

“I love him,” I admitted. “I will always love him.”

“Always is a very long time, my Olympian lover,” the nymph said, rolling out of my embrace.

“No one knows that better than you and I, Marie.”

“He is my enemy,” her eyes darkened and her lips drew into a severe line.

“Tell me, Marie,” I drew her closer against my body and she yielded, sinking into me again. Our legs entwined and our mouths met and for a few moments I lost my train of thought. But then, “Tell me what you did to make him turn against you.”

“You know what I did,” she whispered into my chest. “I took something that was only his to take.” Her fingers pressed against my ribs and slid down to my hip, where they curled against my iliac bone. “And then, I had the audacity to taunt him with it.”

Momentarily confused, I needed to dig deep into my memories of centuries past until I knew what she had meant. “Oh, Marie… you told him…”

“I am sorry, my darling. I regret it now. I should have known how fragile his ego was when it came to you. But I never did let myself feel the full extent of his love for you, for it had always threatened me. That had been my mistake.” Again, her eyes met mine, and I read genuine remorse in them. “Forgive me, count?”

“What you and I did,” I whispered against her tiny earlobe, “it may have all been a game to you, but it meant something to me.”

“So, you don’t forgive me?”

“I did not say that, you foolish nymphette.” I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed the tips of her fingers. “Now that I know what you did,” I bit gently around one of the digits to get her attention, “I’m surprised you got off as easily as that, Madame. Taking Philippe had been a political move for him, not a personal one.”

“It wasn’t all he did,” her eyes glowed with a sudden burst of fire. “He had been… cruel to me, Athos. He had insulted me about as deeply as a man could insult a woman.”

“Tell me,” I implored, still holding her hand.

“I had come to him for help, and not only did he refuse me… He… He mocked me...” She halted, the memories pressing down on her even centuries of being an amorphous being later. “A nasty trick with mirrors. I had grown old, Athos, in a way that he would never be. And he showed me exactly how old and hideous I had become.” Her face contorted and she turned from me, to hide against the pillow. 

“Marie,” I leaned over her and pressed my lips to her exposed shoulder, “you could never be hideous.”

“And Aramis could never be evil, isn’t that so?”

“What is evil?” I asked the nymph, trailing my lips down her back. “Morality is relative. And we who are and yet are not of this world know that better than anyone. A human vessel’s age has no bearing on your beauty.”

“You have strayed too long, too far away from humans, my friend, if you can say that and mean it.”

I felt the rub of her words, since she had somehow hit upon a very simple truth.

“I wish there to be peace again between those I love,” I whispered against her warm flesh, turning her onto her back so that I could once more sample the bouquet of her arousal. “You loved him once. What will it take for you to forgive him?”

“What it will take, he would never consent to give.”

“He will do what I ask of him,” I said, burying my face in the damp hair of her groin. We still had hours before sunrise, and I hadn’t quite exhausted my mental list of everything I have been wanting to do to that infuriating, titillating woman. For ages.

***

I missed the Old Gods. Even as I floated from the cavernous depths of Hypnos’ realm into consciousness, I tried to cling to the last dream that the son of Nyx had sent upon me. To no avail, alas. I opened my eyes to the lightsome noon, and the droplets of Lethe waters that he had sprinkled upon my brow sizzled and dried under the rays of the sun – alongside other effusions that coated my skin. I stretched in the sheets, my arms and legs thrown open, and basked in the sensation of sated soreness that rendered my body languid and indolent. It would appear that the God of Discord had inherited some talents from his Thunderous Father.

The door opened, and my faithful Clothilde lurched in with a most-welcome tray that emitted the seductive aroma of coffee and fresh bread. I closed my legs, for there was no need to scandalise the faithful domestic by displaying last night’s battlefield quite so shamelessly to her grey and demure gaze. She was French and therefore a former convent pupil, who for reasons best known to herself had attached herself to a notorious courtesan. As she did not steal from me, I expected she was collating anecdotes of commercial value, of which there were many. And bon courage to her.

“Mademoiselle de Lorme is here,” she informed me as she fluffed up my pillows (an impressive feat, considering their soaked and soggy state).

“Send her in.”

“Will Madame be requiring the red flowers today?” Her eyes were lowered, but I felt the appraising gaze burn me from beneath her lashes.

“Madame most certainly will.” I sipped my coffee and reached for today’s copy of the _Siècle_ with tingling fingers. Who knew what lurked on its pages these days, now that the Titanic progeny had lifted the veil and creatures of shadows spilled out from the Beyond into the mundane and muddy streets of 1840s Paris?

“Good morning, chérie,” my pretty paramour greeted me as she floated in in a halo of light. She was wearing a splendid tall hat with a wide brim and purple plumes, which looked nothing like the bonnets du jour and brought to mind a fashion that had been en vogue two hundred years ago. “Do you like it?” she asked, having greeted me with a kiss as she leaned over me and cupped my breast. “It’s my own design. Courtesaning is all well and good, but I confess I’ve grown rather tired of cock of late, I need a new career.”

“Mmh,” I couldn’t reply on account of having stuffed my mouth with jentacular morsels.

Marion smirked. “I see you don’t agree.” Her gaze trailed down my body, now decorously shrouded in a chemise and bed jacket, yet glowing through the layers of fabric. “God-cock any good, then?”

“You have no idea.” I stretched back in the pillows and smiled at her with swollen lips. “It is a magnificent instrument.”

Marion threw her hat on a chair and leapt on the bed, straddling me. “Do tell!”

“Words alone cannot describe it! It has to be experienced to be understood.” We both laughed. I pulled her down and kissed her, and her breasts pressed into mine. “No wonder that _vampyre_ always looks so smug.”

“Do you still want the vampyre dead?” Marion rubbed her cheek against mine, and its softness, so striking after Athos’ stubble-rough skin, made me shiver.

“More than ever,” I whispered. Her body was lithe atop me: light rendered solid and captured in human form, and the warmth of her arousal pressed down on my groin.

“He’s useful,” she whispered back, kissing my neck. “And pretty.”

“He killed me.”

“Old age killed you.”

“He made me old.”

“Your children made you old.” She tugged at the laces of my bed jacket and slipped it off my shoulders to kiss my breasts. “The vipers you suckled at your bosom.” Her body tightened in a sinuous curve atop me as she continued to kiss me while pulling up the hem of my chemise at the same time. “You should spare Aramis, chérie. He’s been a good friend to me.”

“Oh darling, you think he’s some sort of lutin or leprechaun that you can guide at will. But he’s devious.” My hand in her hair and I was opening my legs under her touch. “Don’t trust him, he will stab you in the back one day. You want to know about vipers at bosoms? Take a good look at him.”

“I have.” Her lips had reached the inside of my thigh and I angled my hips towards the heat of her mouth. Marion laughed softly and blew a cool breath of air that made me shiver. “You are insatiable.”

“You love it.”

“Mmh…” She ducked her head and licked across my heated flesh. “I’m curious… what does he taste like, I wonder?” The tip of her tongue slipped inside me and she _slurped_. “The spunk of Discord,” she murmured, “you’re dripping with it, chérie. He must have pumped you full of it.”

“He did!” I gasped, for her tongue moved upwards and flicked over my clit, swollen and over-sensitised after last night’s Olympian debauchery. “He was at it all night.”

“You won’t be needing this then.” She thrust her fingers up me and withdrew them at once. “Not after the Son of Zeus stuck it up there.”

“You monster!” I laughed, panting. “Don’t you dare leave me high and dry.”

“You are not dry, Marie.” She was nibbling at the inside of my thigh, and her fingers danced gently, teasingly across my skin. “You’re never dry.”

The rustling of silk told me that she was hitching up her own petticoats, and then her fingers drove inside me again and I knew by the way she moaned into my groin that her other hand mirrored the motion between her own legs. She was fucking us both with her fingers, slow and hard, and then her hand withdrew and she sucked me in - a sure sign that she was rubbing her clit now. My own fingers were numb, just like my toes, and a tingling cold spread from my feet and my hands up my legs and arms, like ice spreads on a stream under Boreas’ breath. All heat from my body pooled in my head and my loins, and then, Marion opened her mouth in a voracious kiss and I melted into it with a groan.

I tasted Athos on her lips when she slithered up my body to kiss me, his flavour mingling with my own, and its potency made my head spin. Where the salt of the ocean and the sweetness of rivers comingle, where waves crash into the delta, where waters churn and swirl in an eternal frenzied dance, _this is where the Ondines are born_. I sighed into my lover’s mouth and she smiled.

“Come here, you wily seductress.” I grabbed her around her waist and flipped her over, reaching blindly for the drawer in the nightstand. My fingers closed around the smooth shaft they encountered there and I shoved it under her petticoats, between her legs, rubbing it in the slick wetness. Marion gasped, her mouth, her eyes open, devouring me as I hung above her, panting. “On your knees, Madame.”

She complied without a word, presenting the swell of her arse to me under the bunched-up silk of her dress. “So wet,” I muttered as I slid the tip of the dildo into her cunt. “You can take it all at once, can’t you, sweetheart.” A sudden hard push, and she was groaning, her back arched like a cat’s and her thighs shuddering with impending climax. I watched the muscles around the dildo clench and throb while she panted her drawn-out release, drenching my hand with her juices. I didn’t pull the dildo out, even as she collapsed into the pillows, rolled on her back and yanked me down.

“Tired of cock, are you?” I laughed into the swell of her breasts and screwed the length of wood deeper into her spent cunt.

“Not of your cock, Marie. It’s one of the best ones I ever met.”

“Better than Aramis’?”

She merely smiled her fairy smile.

“Ah! So we’ve come back to the _vampyre_!” It was childish, but I was taking a perverted pleasure from referring to him by the poncy moniker a pretentious Romantic had come up with. I could feel the demon’s fangs tingle with irritation from here.

“As we always would. You know you can’t kill him, chérie.”

“Of course I can. Cut off his head, burn the body, scatter the ashes. Easy. Watch him try to come back from _that_.”

“Discord would have something to say about that.”

“I can handle Discord.”

“You can _sow_ discord.” She grinned. “Not sure if you can handle it quite as well.”

“Watch me.”

“With pleasure.” She kissed my shoulder. “I’m sure the sight of you handling Discord is breathtaking. But don’t digress, nymph, when I’m trying to persuade you not to murder an old friend.”

“You want to murder my lover’s father.” I shrugged.

“And you insist that I mustn’t, even though he deserves it for stealing your Discord’s memoirs and exposing him and his friends to the world.” She sighed. “We must align our murdering priorities, Marie, lest we’ll fall out about something as silly as that.”

“I am prepared to forgo the burning and the scattering of ashes,” I compromised. “His head on a silver platter, however – you must admit, Marion, it would be splendid. I would permit it to be reattached in due course, if you insist.”

“Oh, generous nymph!” She kissed my hand. “My orisons have been answered. Also,” she began to lick my fingers, sucking them in one after the other, “you taste filthily fabulous. The aroma of debauchery has seeped into your skin. What will M. le Titan say – if, indeed, today is his turn?”

“It is not.” I yawned and sat up, unpeeling strands of hair from my shoulders and chest. “Not until Friday. I’m entertaining Count Frou-Frou today.” We both laughed. The young count’s real name might have figured in Clothilde’s little book of salacious tales that would keep her fed and clothed in her dotage, but ‘Frou-Frou’ suited him better by far. “I’m afraid the poor mite will be very disappointed, though,” I continued as I slipped out of bed and sauntered to the washstand. “For sad as it is, today is a day of red camellias.”

“Will those men ever realise that you do not, in fact, menstruate?”

“How should they? They know nothing about how menstruation works, let alone how to spot inconsistencies in my excuses. All they know is that red camellia means danger of the highest order. Must be all that military training men undergo: it teaches them to follow signs and symbols rather than _think_.”

“That was very clever of you, I must say.” Marion eyed me approvingly from where she was reclining on my bed, but I couldn’t tell if it was my cleverness she appreciated or the fact that I was rubbing a wet towel between my legs.

Since I had taken an adolescent body, rather than being reborn into a human family and growing up a human child, my nature was more ambiguous than in my most recent incarnations. I was water inhabiting a human form. I was amorphous, I transcended two states, I was a hybrid: neither fish nor fowl. Creatures like me were traditionally depicted as mermaids, with faces and - very important - breasts of a woman, and the tail of fish. Mortals sensed that procreation with my kind would be impossible, and fishtail symbolism was the best they could do to express that notion. Bless.

“I wish I’d have come up with it,” Marion continued. “But since I didn’t, a career change is in order.”

“Hats?”

“Hats.” She leapt from the bed, picked up her discarded hat, walked over to stand behind me and placed it on my head, watching me in the mirror. “You were a seamstress, my dear, why should I not become a milliner? A hat à la Marion de Lorme has a certain ring to it, don’t you think? A couple of countesses and a duchess or two have already expressed an interest.” She cupped my breasts from behind and rested her chin on my shoulder, watching me with dark lynx-eyes.

“Don’t you think you should perhaps change your name if you intend to become a famous designer? Marion de Lorme, the woman M. Hugo immortalised in his eponymous drama? The woman who knew M. de Cinq-Mars, as M. de Vigny tells us in great detail? The woman,” I saw my eyes sparkle with mirth in the mirror, “who is but a throwaway line in M. Dumas' wildly popular series about the adventures of three dashing musketeers?”

She rolled her eyes and nipped at my shoulder with sharp teeth. “The woman whose name I have adopted as my nom de guerre, darling. Seeing as the name of my favourite lover, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, was already taken,” she added pointedly, as her fingers travelled along the swell of my breasts and pinched my nipples. “Hiding in plain sight, Marie. Isn’t that what our lives are all about?”

“Nom de guerre, Marion?” I smiled, leaning back into her body. “Do you think this is war?”

“Of course it is.” Her mouth on the side of my neck, trailing up, towards my jaw, my cheek. “Everything is.”

***

Everything felt turned upside down. The linden trees at Place Royale (once Place des Vosges, but now Place Royale, and soon to be Place des Vosges again) taunted me with their saccharine aroma. But rue Férou was still there, and so was rue de Vaugirard. The bells of St. Sulpice were the same. Why had the Titanic plagiarist summoned their ghosts from the past? Much like his father, who had always had a soft spot for piracy, Alexandre Dumas had stolen my memories of myself at my absolute lowest, and made a living off them.

And I drowned my sorrows in nymph, it seemed.

Luckily, there was no need to stray into my old haunts since the Boulevard de la Madeleine was on the same bank as Place Royale, and our ironic residence at the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéminé. I had never visited Marie there, for when we were acquainted she had resided at Hôtel des Luynes. Aramis, however, used to have a key. 

He still had a key, but this time, it had been only to our apartments, and procured for him by an overly obsequious Grimley, who had been practically palpitating at this - his latest opportunity to be an utter imp.

“Here you go, Dr. Flitterbatt… Oh, I suppose I should not call you Dr. Flitterbatt now that we're back in France. Has sir chosen a new identity or should I procure one for you?”

I once again carried the name of a man I killed: the comte de Perregaux. He had been a member of the French cavalry in Algeria for some time, which was sufficient to make people forget that perhaps he had been a few inches shorter and a few shades lighter than I. I had let it be rumored about that I, the comte de Perregaux, had inherited a small fortune, which I intended to spend entirely on Marie Duplessis.

What would the baby Titan say? What would Aramis do?

Order me to take a bath, very likely, I mused as I walked up the stairs towards our apartments. The foyer smelled suspiciously medicinal, and I had to wonder what had Aramis and the leprechaun been up to this time. 

I found him in the company of tinctures, doubtlessly packed by Grimley before our departure of the Cotswolds where the good Grigori and the young doctor kept a veritable Eden of things that could kill you. Some could kill you swiftly, some slowly, some more some less disgustingly, some rather violently, and yet others so suddenly that it was worth noting in Dr. Flitterbatt’s diary, for later use.

His back had been to me, but my angel of darkness never needed his eyes to spot me.

“You reek,” he pronounced without stirring. “Take a bath.”

I stood in the doorway, contemplating my next move. Here we were, then. Dumas was still alive, and I was rather thirsty, despite having spent all night with a water deity.

“What about you?” I finally asked. “Are you planning to go on working?” Probably refining a slow and agonizing death for M. Dumas, that’s where I’d put my money if I had still been a gambling man.

“And for god’s sakes, wash your hair,” he responded, still refusing to face me.

I had begun to unbutton my vest, when my hands stilled and I was filled with an overwhelming need to hold him.

“Aramis…”

“Not now.”

“You know that I’m yours, right?”

“I said, not _now_.”

I dropped my vest and my tailcoat into the armchair and watched the space in between his shoulder blades for any sign of release. I saw none. I moved towards the bathing quarters, pausing once more in the doorway, lingering there, with my arm pressed into the wooden frame, as if the house was about to encroach and come down upon me.

“I will never leave you, Aramis.”

His shoulder blades moved in a covert sigh, like two wings, opening and closing. My little nightwing. My _nuxterida_.

“Bath,” he muttered again, his voice softer, more tired. Possibly more resigned. 

The water had been hot against my skin. I closed my eyes and let my body sink into the tub. My arms floated up to the surface and I asked my mind to still, remembering the comfort I had once found in meditation.

Outside, I could hear the rhythmic clip-clop of carriages leaving Place Royale, punctuated by cries of children playing musketeers versus cardinal’s guards, and I sank deeper into the tub with a groan.

“I thought you might need some help,” Aramis’ voice bounced off the walls around me and I wiped water from my eyes. He hovered near the tub, not quite close enough to touch, but close enough to startle me.

“You snuck up on me, sweetling.” Sneaky flittermouse. His face had been unreadable, and had I been a mortal man, I would have been hard pressed to decide whether this had been an olive branch or a sprig of hemlock that I was being extended. 

His movements had always deceived the eye, for in a blink he had been standing behind me, his fingers playing along the muscles of my shoulders. I held my breath, trying to glean from those soft fingertips what fate had in store for me at that moment. He kneaded at my flesh and I allowed the tension to dissipate under his touch. His nails pressed down against my skin, enough to mark but not enough to hurt, and then his thumb traced the vertebrae of my neck, up and up, one at a time, until it came to rest at the base of my skull.

“What will it be, Aramis?” I broke the spell.

“I told you to wash your hair,” I heard, before the palm of his hand pressed into the crown of my head, fingers clamped around my skull, and he pushed me under water.

My hands clutched at the rim of the tub purely instinctively. _What now, flittermouse?_ I thought. He had no intention of letting me go, it seemed, and I wasn’t going to resist him. I could only hold my breath for so long before I would have to let water fill my lungs. It wouldn’t kill me, but it wasn’t a life experience I cared to repeat after my run-in with the Tentacles of Destiny back in our Rhodesian times. Did he really want to hurt me? My angel, my love, my very existence: no, it wasn’t his hand pushing me under the water. It was his pain. Aramis would never hurt me. My blood pounded against my temples and my fingers unclenched from the tub. I was about to let the water claim me, when those same fingers clutched me by the hair and dragged me back to the surface.

I gasped for air, my lungs burned, and the fire of Discord kindled in my blood. I rose from the water with one powerful heave, creating a minor flood as I did, and turned to where Aramis had been standing, arms crossed, watching me as calmly as if he were at the theater. 

“Was that fun for you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied with a half-smirk hidden in the corner of his mouth. “What’s the matter, Athos? I thought you were quite _fond_ of water.”

I ground my teeth. My sister’s mantle simultaneously clung to me and billowed like a battle standard in the wind.

“You utter child!” I exploded. “When will you learn that the only power you have over me is the power that I give you?”

His body slammed against mine with all its force, knocking both me and the tub over, and we both lay soaked on the flooded floorboards. Somewhere beneath us, there would be a very disgruntled pair of domestics, who would get stuck with the clean-up once again.

He straddled me, this time not caring if his claws drew blood.

“But you’re very good at it, aren’t you?” he snarled into my face. “Giving up power. Giving it all up.”

I smiled up at him and that earned me a slap across the face. My chest heaved and I forced myself to unclench my fists where they had gripped onto the sharp edges of his hips. (Gods, but those bones had been created for my hands to mold to!)

“I’m not going to fight you, Aramis.”

“No? Are you going to just lie there and take it, like my bitch?”

“Aramis…”

“Shut up.” His hand was in my hair again as he dragged me along the slippery floor. “Up, you bitch. Let me see how good you are at this.” He slammed my body into the wall as I scrambled up to my knees, his chest pressed against my wet back, his hands groping blindly at my ass, even as his hot breath tickled against my earlobe. “Let me see you.” His hand connected with my flesh in a loud slap and I moaned, unable to hide the effect his violent outburst was having on me.

I curved my back for him, presenting him with my ass while I leaned against the wall, my mouth opened and gasping against my own forearm.

“You _are_ very good,” he panted into my ear with another slap. “A very good bitch, indeed.”

“Aramis,” I pushed myself off the wall, letting my arm to ensnare his neck and hold him close while his finger spread and penetrated me without much preparation. Through the lust-haze, my heart knew what he needed to hear, even as the mantle of Discord slithered and lay soaked in the puddle of murky bath water. “Aramis, I am yours.”

A sob escaped and was buried in my neck, followed by the feel of his teeth sinking into my flesh.

“I am. All yours. You… just take me.”

With a violent grunt, he slammed me into the wall again, forcing his way inside me with his long and insistent cock that burned and throbbed like an angry beast. I cried out and lost my purchase, held up only by the force of his ferocious fucking. I shut my eyes and made myself helpless against the onslaught, letting him penetrate me in whichever way he needed. His hands were everywhere but on my cock, gripping me tightly, leaving angry bruises on my flesh if only for a short time. I pushed back against him, taking my pleasure despite the fact that he went out of his way to deny it to me. 

But there was one thing I hadn’t been entirely honest with him about - I _was_ powerless. Powerless to resist the pleasure surging in my gut and bones at each one of his touches, even the most violent ones. Powerless against the onslaught of desire, of all consuming love that burned me up and resurrected me like the phoenix. 

I did the only thing I could: I came screaming his name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed the intricate Plot and copious Character Development we put into this chapter, Audience.


	4. Venus in Furs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you celebrating Jesus is a Revenant Day: Happy (Catholic) Easter! (You pagans! I hope you realize your Easter is measured by the full moon and the vernal equinox!)

**Paris, July 1844**

His hair still smelled of nymph hours later, as we drifted in a haze in each other’s arms. He slept – out of habit rather than out of necessity, I believed, for the God of Discord didn’t require sleep in the same way as the demigod had done. That magnificent body which he had given to me so generously pressed up against mine, as if he tried to burrow himself beneath me in his sleep, one leg hooked around mine and his fingers wrapped tightly around my wrist. Damp clouds of his breath settled on my collarbone, and his heartbeat guided mine.

But I wouldn’t be led. My heart pumped his blood through my veins in frantic throbs, an ugly discord in the melody of our joint song. When I lifted my hand from where it rested on his shoulder I watched the swollen veins empty and deflate as the blood flowed down the length of my forearm, into the crook of my elbow, and the back of my hand was white and smooth like alabaster. “Don’t wake,” I whispered soundlessly against his brow, ready to invoke the wrath of Zeus in the hope that he’d make Athos my Endymion. I trailed my open palm over the curve of his shoulder, the contour of his back, marvelling once again at how alive that body of marble was. How soft and pliant he had been under my hands after we’d picked ourselves up from the murky puddle into which we’d collapsed and he made me fuck him again, in our bed. He on his back, his legs slung around my hips, and watching me with eyes of black ebony. “I love you, Aramis,” he said after I had spent myself, shaking in his arms, and he held me.

Athos woke. My heartbeat sped up, and his blood surged through his veins and through mine. He was mouthing words into my chest and my throat, but I did not hear them. All I heard was the pulse of his blood, the thud of his heart, the eternal, powerful engine of life that propelled us both. Its noise filled my ears, drowning out everything else, black earth in my eyes, and I blinked and saw him looking at me.

“Are you all right, Aramis?”

I heard him now.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He kissed me on the forehead and swung himself out of bed. For a moment, his body was fully illuminated by the rays of the afternoon sun, and his skin glowed golden and he appeared enveloped in a halo of divine light.

I watched him wash and dress, and then – “I have to go, Aramis. You’ll be all right for an hour or two?” He sat on the edge of the bed and took my hand in a gesture that reminded me of a doctor who was about to bleed his patient. “I’m not going to do anything untoward.” He smiled his sad, ancient smile. “I promise.”

The door closed behind him, and I rang the bell for Bartleby. “Fetch me the rosewood casket.”

The leprechaun bowed.

I slid the key into the lock. I looked at the items within and trailed my fingertips along the cool, smooth surfaces. I opened the secret drawer, and then the one behind it. I took out a small bundle wrapped in a silk handkerchief.

I unwrapped and hung the severed finger of Athos around my neck.

It was cool against my skin, and I closed my eyes and pressed my open palm against it, struggling to feel the divine energy trapped within. Blackness blindfolded me. I opened my eyes again and blinked against the sun.

It would have been easy to follow him, for I could always find him. But there was no need to look for him. Bartleby handed me my hat and coat, and I left our apartments, walked down the corridor, past the rooms of our neighbour, whose door stood open and who was, as ever, at his desk, writing with furious determination. He looked up briefly as I passed, and I smiled at him.

Out, out in the street, under the white-hot glare of the afternoon sun, and onwards. To the only other source of light that I knew.

***

The comte de Frou-Frou eyed my décolleté with much trepidation. One might have thought that the innocent red blossoms that adorned my bodice were barrels of gunpowder about to go off. I hid my smile behind my fan and turned to the comte de Perregaux, who had poured himself into a chair with perfect grace and was watching the boy with gleaming eyes.

“Permit me, Madame,” the God of Discord suddenly said and leaned forward. He reached out and plucked a petal off my chest. “It is wilted.”

Frou-Frou blushed as if the imaginary stream of blood that spurted from my womb had shot to his cheeks. He jumped out of his seat, the picture of palpitation, and stammered and staggered his way out of my boudoir, pursued by the rapacious smile of the Olympian. “Shame on you, M. le comte,” I told the smug deity. “It will take the poor darling days to recover from the embarrassment.”

He was twirling the petal between his fingers until nothing but red pulp remained. “This is beneath you, Marie,” he said in a low voice.

I laughed and pointed my fan at him. “What about you, my proud Achaean?” I said. “A god who fucks a demon, how low can you fall?”

“You used to fuck a demon too.”

“That was a very long time ago. He wasn’t broken then.”

“How do you know he is broken now?” He sat up, and I caught a glimpse of an archaic force shimmering around him as he pulled himself up to tower above me. “You haven’t seen him since we came to Paris.”

“I have heard accounts which I’m sure are accurate. I believe he is much changed. Isn’t he?”

For the fraction of a heartbeat, Athos pierced me through with glares like daggers. And then, it was as if a powerful hand had cut through a marionette’s strings. His body sagged, his hands darted forward and seized mine, and a geyser of heat erupted in my loins. “Marie,” his voice was low and urgent. “Please. You have to help me.”

It was impossible to resist those dark, shining eyes, those fevered lips. Those hands, which cradled my own as if he was holding a young bird in the cage of his fingers. And yet, I remained strong.

“No,” I whispered, resisting the pull of the tide that threatened to crash me into his body like into a rock. “You can’t ask that of me.”

He smiled and my heart trembled. “I haven’t told you what I need.”

“You don’t have to. I know what you need.” The _vampyre_ didn’t deserve this: this love, all-consuming and eternal, immovable like the mountain that was the source of his powers.

“Marie,” he repeated my name again, a soft caress that brushed over my skin and made me shiver. I squared my shoulders and pursed my lips as I summoned the mantle of Rohan pride from the recesses of the past. Yet it slipped down my bare arms and my hands trembled in his grasp. Discord smiled. “Marie,” his voice dripped like honey into my ears. “I need your help. He needs you.”

I shook my head, grinding my teeth until my jaws hurt. The only thing the vampyre needed from me was the sharp edge of an axe as it swung down on his neck – preferably in front of a mirror so that he could watch himself when Thanatos’ cold hands seized him and threw him in the ecstasy of death.

“You always made him happy,” Athos continued in the same velvety tones. “You kept him sane when I was trapped in Poseidon’s realm. He…” Discord bit his lip and lowered his eyes. “He’s slipping away from me. I must catch him before he drowns in the darkness of his own soul.”

I laughed. “You want me to save the vampyre from drowning?” The spell was broken. I pulled my hands back and pressed one to my chest, shaken by giggles. “Poor Discord. Begging for harmony must be killing you.” I stroked his cheek with the back of my hand. “What he did was unpardonable, Athos. He _mocked_ me.”

“He’s done worse than that to me.” Athos rubbed the side of his neck that must have been torn open by fangs countless times, and then his hand trailed round to his throat and down his chest. “I will have to _stop_ him,” he said softly.

“You better hurry.” Athos startled and whipped round. The door to the antechamber stood ajar, and Marion had glided in on silent fairy-wings. “He’s wearing your finger again, Discord.”

“What?” Athos frowned at that cryptic revelation. “No, he’s not.”

Marion smirked and slinked closer, shimmering white in golden candlelight. “Wanna bet?” she said almost cheerfully.

***

**Olympus, 1184 BC**

“There is no happiness to be found from _love_ ,” the God of War leaned against the bars of the dungeon and his eyes kindled with an amber flame. “Trust me, I’ve tried. No good comes of falling in love with Love. Look at me and Aphrodite.” There was no reply from the darkness of the Olympian prison. “No, you _look at me_ when I tell you to look at me!” Ares’ voice thundered and shook the bars in his hands, while the stones beneath his feet trembled.

“Your mother,” came the calm voice from the back of the cage, accompanied by the rattling of chains, “is going to kill me.”

“The son of the Thiran whore, is what she called you,” Ares laughed and the chains rattled in response. “No, brother, I will not let her kill you.” The God of War knelt down to wrap one of the chains nearest to the bars around his wrist, pulling on it. “Come closer, doggy, let me get a good look at you.”

Athos did not resist anymore, his face appearing out of the darkness like an unexpected flame, and Ares remembered why he had taken the game too far in the first place. He could have been content to watch his twin sister with her latest toy, had the strange, green-eyed monster not reared its ugly head in the pit of his stomach. _Envy_. Envy like he had not felt since he had lost Aphrodite to that cripple beneath the mountain. It was so easy to take, to claim him, even as he trembled in Eris’ embrace. He did not resist, impaled there between the two of them. He had welcomed it, their joining.

“We should get him some human food,” Eris mused, brushing the perspiration-soaked hair from the demigod’s face.

“Why? We brought him ambrosia,” Ares smiled and pressed the senseless body in his arms closer. “He can survive on ambrosia.”

“This wasn’t part of our plan,” his sister had frowned. “He’s supposed to be _mine_.”

“We’ve always shared everything, sister.”

“You don’t even _like_ men, except for the blood sacrifice they offer you.”

“I like this one.” And he did. He understood what Eris had seen in the warrior from Thira. Here was the perfect instrument of death, with a perfectly gooey middle. To control his heart was to control his sword; and his sword made the most exquisite slaughter, like poetry, like Orpheus with his lyre, but a paean of death. And he had been beautiful, like a glorious death is beautiful.

And now, he was in a cage, thrown there by Ares’ own mother.

“I am her favorite, you see. Hera will listen to my counsel. She will find me impartial.” Ares reached out until his hand rested on his half-brother’s shoulder. The demigod’s eyelids trembled and he bit his lips. He never could resist the touch of War.

“She is more likely to have me thrown into Tartarus,” Athos sighed. “It does not matter. Tell Eris I love her, and that it was worth it.”

“You are a fool, brother,” Ares smiled again. “No love is worth dying for. No love at all. For that - death - is the end of your journey. It is a bell that cannot be unrung. And that is not at all what Eris wants for you.”

“You can save me?” The demigod lifted his eyes to his divine brother’s face.

“I _shall_ save you.”

“What do I have to give you in return?”

“Nothing you are not willing to part with: your loyalty.”

Thus Ares spoke and Athos heard the clashing of a thousand swords ring through the air and reverberate inside his bones. He did not make a reply, but Ares did not need his consent to act.

“The son of the Thiran whore must die,” said the Queen of the Gods.

“What a meaningless punishment, Mother,” Ares replied then. “And hasten his passage to Elysium? He, who is a warrior, and a warrior has but one dream. One dream that you can forever deny him. A punishment worse than death.”

“What is that punishment, my son?”

“Deny him a glorious death. Make him immortal.”

“Are the Eumenides upon you, Ares?” Hera laughed. “It is bad enough my daughter, a goddess besmirched by mortal hands, weeps for him, and now you as well?”

“Condemn him to live forever alone. It would be exquisite torture, worthy of the Gods.”

“Your sister would likely follow him.”

“Then make it so she cannot.”

The Mother Goddess smiled and drew her son closer. “I shall reflect on your counsel. And I shall punish him in a way that is fitting to his crime.”

A glorious death? No. She could do better than deny him a glorious death. She could ensure that his death could ever only be ignominious.

_Hear me, oh bastard of my Husband!_  
_You will leave the realm of the Gods as an immortal,_  
_Pursued wherever you roam by this curse:_  
_May you ever know only disaster from a woman’s touch,_  
_May you know nothing but misery from the warmth of a woman’s skin,_  
_So that a woman’s love shall forever be denied you._  
_And lest you think to seek comfort elsewhere, hear this:_  
_You will never age and you will never die,_  
_except by the breaking of your own heart._  
_Now, go! Before I change my mind and smite you!_

***

**Paris, July 1844**

Darkness pressed down on Paris by the time I left Marion’s apartments and meandered through the alleys of Paris. The moon rolled over the rooftops of Paris as I traversed its streets, aimless and timeless, like the resurgents of my old home, risen from the dead and condemned to walking this earth like the Wandering Jew. My soul rose towards the stygian depths of the sky and the night air soaked up the heat of my fevered brow. As I looked up towards the scattered pinpricks of light, all I saw were the contours of Athos’ long-dead relatives. Athos. Always Athos, always. The eternal flame, the rock upon which I had built my church. The silver thread appeared before me, and I followed it, pulled towards my God by a power stronger than myself.

A tray stood on the table in our room, untouched but for the bottle of wine that was half empty. Athos lay on the chaise-longue, his shirt open, his arms languid and relaxed. But the vein in his neck was throbbing with harsh, urgent beats.

“There you are, flittermouse,” he said, as if determined to remind me of the night when he first stepped on the path that led him to the nymph.

I sniffed the air demonstratively. “No Loire waters?”

He smiled his sad, ancient smile. “It is the Orne now.” He stirred and pushed himself up on his elbow. “I didn’t, Aramis. I told you I wouldn’t. Remember? Come here.” He reached out towards me. “Please,” he added as I didn’t move. “I want to tell you something.”

I approached him carefully, watching his face.

“I’m not going to bite.” He smirked. “Come here, Aramis. You need to hear this. Marie-”

My blood froze and my fangs dropped. In a flash, Athos had leapt up and yanked me close. “You fool,” he hissed into my ear. His arms were wrapped around me like iron chains, unyielding and unbreakable. So strong. He had yielded that strength to me so many times, but not tonight.

We sank onto the carpet, our limbs entwined, our bones fused, our shared blood fuelling our joint heartbeat. He was holding me to his chest like a child, and my mouth burrowed in the crook of his neck. “Take it, if you like.” His blood was calling out to me. “It’s yours. Always.”

I pressed my lips closed and nestled my forehead against his shoulder.

“Marie wants you dead,” he was speaking very softly. “You understand that, chyortik, don’t you? You’d insulted her. You understand the desire to spill the blood of men who insulted you.”

“Athos-”

“Shh… let me talk. I have to tell you something. Something that became clear to me tonight.”

“When you were with her,” I hissed.

“Yes.” He kissed my hair. “Marion was there too, and she said something that triggered… that made me understand…” He swallowed. “Don’t interrupt, Aramis,” he whispered. “I have to tell you, but I don’t know how. Marion mentioned the days when you two met, during the Reign of Terror. When she found you and asked for your help. What happened then haunts you still, doesn’t it, Aramis?” I shivered in his arms, but he held me. “I know that, Aramis, because… I too am never free of the past. Do you remember Olympus, Aramis?” His breath brushed my lips and I tasted the bittersweet aroma of wine.

“You came back to life,” I muttered.

“No, not that. The first time we were there, together. Do you remember? The altar. The goat. Hera’s cake.” He laughed, and I laughed with him.

“The orgies…” he whispered, suddenly serious again. “That was not the first time that I was being kept on the Holy Mountain by the gods.”

“Athos-”

“No, let me.” He flexed his arm behind me and I felt him drink from his wine glass. “Let me tell you what happened when… when Hera cursed me.”

_Hear me, oh bastard of my Husband!_

The conclusion of his gruesome tale; it made me shiver. Did he hear her still, in the solitude of his dreams? The words of the ancient curse, translated from the ancient language of the Olympians into the Greek that I understood. He whispered them into my ear, quiet, so quiet that I felt rather than heard them, as if he feared that their sound might rouse the Mother Goddess from her sleep.

_Now, go! Before I change my mind and smite you!_

Silence sank around us after the half-murmured, half-sung words faded away.

“You see, Aramis,” he spoke softly into my skin. “The curse was meant to hurt me, forever. And it hasn’t been broken, has it?”

“What do you mean?”

He exhaled shakily. “I hurt you, my love. Hera’s curse is still working. I haven’t left the past behind, it’s clinging to me still. I might never be rid of it.”

“You carry those memories with you still.”

“Three thousand years’ worth of memories, flittermouse,” he smiled. “Every single one as vivid as ever.”

“I don’t.” I didn’t know what had driven me to this confession. Never before had I felt the need to share it with him: the black void that concealed my early years.

“What about your family? Do you remember them?”

“I am alone in the world, and have only you to guide me.” I frowned in an attempt to remember a father, whom I must have had. A mother, whom I must have loved. _A family_. I was of noble birth and came from a line of princes. I knew the facts of my life before death, even though I did not feel anything when I thought back to those days. The life I’d led before I died, it was black like the depth of the grave, like the abyss of my soul. Like the _nihil_ of death. “I was educated in a monastery since I was a boy.”

“My priestling,” he murmured tenderly. “I remember your monkish garb well.”

“That is all I know. And then, I died.” Life draining from me in an endless stream. Blood spouting from my chest and gurgling in my mouth. The man who had mocked the little monk stood above me, hand on his hip, and his mouth gaped like a black abyss with breathless, giddy laughter. His blood, sweeter than honey on my tongue, filling my veins, filling me with his virility and power. I had soaked up his lifeforce and it had turned me into something new. The blackness of death had erased me, and from the fire of blood I was reborn. The blood of Popă Alexandru turning to vinegar in my mouth as he baptised me with the name that I wore to this day.

“You really don’t know who you are?”

“I am Aramis.” I shifted in his embrace and looked him straight in the eye.

“Yes,” he smiled and his eyes shone, more luminous than ever, like stars in the celestial vault above his ancestral home. He cupped my face and brushed his thumb over my brow. “And you are mine.”

***

I had just returned to my “ancestral” lands in Normandy from a truly invigorating bit of raiding off the coast of Ceylon, when I found a most bewildering letter awaiting me.

_Porthos,_ I had recognized my cousin’s hand, _I am personally going to rip your dick off. Come immediately to Paris and inquire after me at the home of a Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis on the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Ask for the comte de Perregaux. She’ll recognize you, even though you may not recognize her. Hurry. Athos_

Well, the cuz was never one to beat in the vicinity of bushes, literally or figuratively. There was also, I was amused to note, a post-script from Aramis. It read, _P.S. After Athos is done ripping off your cock, I’m going to rip off your balls and feed them to my leprechaun. Miss you._

Evidently, I had done something with my cock and balls that the disgusting duo did not find worthy of their approval. Even so, I was not accustomed to quite so much open threats of violence _from Athos_. Aramis, of course, had always been a whole different animal to begin with.

There was an herb in the Indies that the locals had dubbed _charas_ and I had brought some home with me from my raids; I briefly contemplated taking some to Paris with me to soothe the ravening beasts. Of course, I had no way of knowing whether this soothing remedy would work on revenants, but leaned towards bringing some just in case. I was very staunchly attached to my cock and balls, you understand.

Paris teemed with civilization, almost aggressively. It buzzed with an infectious energy that lifted my spirits almost as effectively as turning my face towards my skybound Da. On my way to Mlle. Duplessis’ salon, I was assaulted by a number of street urchins who were attempting to duel each other with long, wooden sticks, while shouting “One for all!” at the top of their pre-pubescent lungs.

I grabbed one of them by the suspenders and made him escort me to the correct house on Boulevard de La Madeleine. “Beautiful floozy, that!” the young upstart declared, earning a kick in the arse from me, as well as a smack upside the head.

The beautiful floozy in question handed me the address where I was told I would find my friends, while smiling at me in a way that I found to be most peculiar.

“Mlle. Duplessis,” I bowed in thanks, “I do not believe I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance.”

“Not officially, Monsieur,” the courtesan smiled, the camelias on her bosom shaking with each delicate exhale. “Although I am quite well acquainted with your… Ah well, I better let Athos tell you.”

I thanked her again, scratching my head over how this lady of entertainment knew my cousin who eschewed female company as ardently as I tended to avoid fasting. It seemed the mystery would remain unsolved for a little while longer, while I sought out my bosom companions in this the former stomping ground of our glory days.

“I don’t want to be Porthos! I want to be Athos!”

I turned about in the direction of this inexplicable exclamation and beheld a new gaggle of urchins.

“Well, you can’t be! I got dibs on Athos! You can be Aramis, if you want.”

“You there!” I pointed to the children. “There’s a coin in it for you if you tell me what the devil you’re going on about.”

“Why _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ , sir,” the boy who insisted on being called Athos declared. “It was in the papers these past months.”

There was some bizarre mystery hidden in all this and I began to suspect it had something to do with the threatened violence to my cock.

“What the devil is this… Three Musketeers thing?” I asked.

“A tale of adventure, sir,” the kid continued.

“A tale? Written by whom?”

My young interlocutor looked momentarily at a loss, seeking support from his comrades, when at last, one of the more shy urchins whispered in a barely-audible voice, “Alexandre Dumas, sir.”

“Blimey!” I declared.

***

He would not sleep, of course not, but Aramis allowed me to cradle him into my arms as he rested his head on my shoulder so that my chin fit into the groove of his skull where the soft plates must have fused when he was just a babe. As if his angels (or demons) had somehow crafted his very bones to fit seamlessly with mine. What would our bones look like mingled together, I wondered. When reduced to nothing but bone, can you distinguish the god from the demon?

My hand clenched around the talisman he wore against his heart and I pressed my lips to his temple.

“You are _not_ alone in the world,” I whispered against the shell of his ear and he stirred in my arms, his head rubbing up against my cheek like a content cat. “We've been through so much together, you and I. There is nothing you can say or do to ever lose me.”

“You’ve never seen me at my worst,” he muttered, looking out the opened window onto the verdant square of Place Royale, cast in Selene’s soft and benevolent glow. “I think,” his fingers caressed the veins of my hand where it still clutched my own bone, “you are incapable of seeing me at my worst.” I could almost make out a smile in his voice and I pressed my lips to the skin behind the shell of his ear, where summer heat and the heat of our bodies had rendered the flesh moist with perspiration. “It is as if your sister Aphrodite has drawn a blindfold around your eyes,” he added.

“If Aphrodite has blindfolded me, then I am grateful for it,” I replied, nipping gently at the top of his ear. “Twice now you’ve pulled me back from the grasp of Thanatos and Hades,” I said, pulling the talisman from around his neck and casting it aside. “I’m afraid I’m yours to keep, Monsieur.” His hand shot out, chasing the chain with its grim keepsake, and I had caught it in my own hand instead. “All of me, Aramis.” I brought his hand to my lips and kissed his knuckles one by one. “You have all of me now.”

“There’s more,” he whispered, facing me, his eyes black like an abyss yet bright as the stars, “More that you don’t know. That I haven’t told you.”

My hand caressed his neck and scooped along the sharp bones of his cheeks, keeping his face still so I could kiss him. “You’ll tell me when you’re ready,” I whispered against his lips in between kisses.

Ares had been wrong when in my last mortal days he had told me that no love was worth dying for. I had to die for love, to truly live again.

***

I entered the Immortal Marrieds’ temporary abode with my hands protecting my privates. The God of Discord and his demonic consort were not the type of men to make idle threats.

“I come in peace!” I pronounced. “Please don’t hurt my cock - I am rather physically and emotionally attached to it.”

Grimley took my hat and smirked at me with diabolical glee. “Tea?”

“No thanks, Grimley. But I brought quite a bit of it from Ceylon that I’d be happy to offload to you..,” I halted at the sight of Athos, glaring at me as if violence was indeed imminent. “Later.”

“Cousin!” He appeared to summon civility from deep within his divine reserves and opened his arms to me after all.

“I know about Alexandre Dumas,” I thought I would get straight to the point, while I cautiously allowed him to pull me into an embrace. “Well, I suspect I know why you’ve summoned me. I confess, the details of the affair still elude me.”

“Porthos,” Athos let go of me and held me an arm’s length apart, looking me up and down, as if seeing me for the first time. “You’re a father.”

“And a grandfather,” Aramis glided into the room, smiling at me in such a way that I had suddenly far preferred the glares of Athos to his serpentine facsimile of good will. “Isn’t that right, Athos? Marie is very intimately acquainted with Porthos’ grandson, is she not?”

“Marie?” I inquired with growing confusion. “Oh, you mean Marie Duplessis?”

“She is Marie de Rohan,” Aramis slithered past me, pulling up a chair into which I immediately collapsed.

“Oh!”

“Yes, the same,” Athos added, while I looked from one of them to the other, attempting to ascertain what in the nine hells I had actually walked in on.

“So..,” I began, more cautiously. “My boy wrote a book?”

“ _Your son_ , Porthos, _your son_ , right,” Athos loomed over me, “stole my memoirs and disclosed our secret to the world! Just like that!” He snapped his fingers before my face.

“Ho ho ho, that’s my boy!” I pronounced with pride until Athos’ expression made me choke on my laughter. “Wait… what? You don’t look happy about this.”

“Are you even understanding the gravity of the situation _at all_?” Aramis leaned over my shoulder. His breath felt like the Arctic winds.

“Well, if you didn’t want the secret to get out,” I turned towards Athos, “why did you write all that stuff down in the first place?”

“What?” Athos squinted at me. “That is _not_ the point!”

“No, no, Porthos asked a good question. Why _did_ you write all that stuff down?” Aramis veered towards his lover.

“I don’t know,” Athos shook his head. “I was bored. Porthos was married, _you_ were away playing Capture the Papal See, and I was…”

“Meditating? Growing tulips? Fucking nymphs? How did you even find the time to be bored!”

“Shut up, Aramis!”

“Why don’t you make me!”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, _please_ ,” I rose from the chair being fully aware that one more word and my attendance would become perfectly superfluous. It was nice, though, to see that some things never changed with those two. “What can I do?”

“Well, for one thing, you can explain how your boy Alex got into my papers!” Athos took a step towards the table and poured himself a glass of wine, which he proceeded to drain with impressive rapidity.

“I did not even realize your memoirs were in my possession,” I confessed. “When I married Madame Dumas - that... that was the name I went by when Saint-Georges and I-”

“We _know_!” my friends exclaimed in unison.

“Right, well… We lived in a cottage on the old territory, in Villers-Cotterêts. There was quite a lot of the estate that was abandoned and unattended to. The boy must have stumbled upon it by accident.” I paused and cast a poignant look at Athos. “Not all of us have a Grigori, you know, to clean up our messes.”

“And you never told him who you were?” Aramis continued the interrogation, ignoring my jibe at his spouse.

“You know I hadn’t! And you did your voodoo thing to them when I left, Aramis, didn’t you?”

“I convinced them you were dead,” the revenant shrugged.

“Yes, that… that would do.”

“And we should keep it that way!” Athos interjected. “Don’t be getting it into your head to play the paternal figure to him now that he’s famous!”

“Oh ho ho,” I barreled my chest. “My boy is famous! So. The book is good, eh?”

“I think I’m going to eat him while you watch,” Aramis mewled and dissolved into a smile of perfectly chilling charm.

“It’s bad then,” I shook my head. “Very, very bad.”

Athos had dropped his face into his hands and refused to meet either of our gazes. A very uncomfortable silence permeated the room, during which time I became increasingly interested in the pattern of the drapes.

“You should at least read it,” Athos finally groaned, “before we decide.”

“Decide what?” I asked, watching my cousin refill his empty glass with more wine.

“Whether we have to kill him.”


	5. An Eye for an Eye

**August 1844, Paris**

“Tell me you won’t let him eat my little scrotum-nugget, Athos!” I pouted and furrowed my brow at my cousin, who had kindly offered to read the sproglet’s novel to me, never having been much of a reader before myself.

“Are you bored already? Do you want me to stop?” Athos set the newspapers aside and reached for his wine. Mechanically, I stretched out my hand for him to refill my glass as well.

“No, no, things were just getting interesting! Did you hear how he described me, Athos?” I grinned, reclining on the couch. “Read the part again about the ‘lofty air.’”

“‘This Musketeer,’” my cousin resumed in his soothing, sonorous voice, “‘had just come off guard, complained of having a cold, and coughed from time to time affectedly. It was for this reason, as he said to those around him, that he had put on his cloak; and while he spoke with a **lofty air** ,’” my cuz emphasized to my pleasure, “‘and twisted his mustache disdainfully, all admired his embroidered baldric, and d'Artagnan more than anyone.’”

“Did you hear that? All admired me! He admires me!”

“Porthos, he is mocking you.”

“Well, why would he be mocking me? He is the fruit of my loin, the pearl of my tentacle! Unless…. unless, that is what _you_ wrote about me!”

“I wasn’t even there,” Athos shrugged.

“Oh, that is true, indeed,” I sat up. “You were not there, I recall clearly now. You came in later, and swooned manfully and heroically into Aramis’ arms.” Athos coughed, dare I say, _affectedly_ , to borrow from my son’s novel. “But how could he know all this happened exactly so? If you hadn’t written it?”

Athos shrugged and shifted awkwardly in the chair as if to sit was causing him some strain. This in turn made me think of… “Aramis?”

“It’s possible,” Athos admitted. “Some of his papers and letters were kept with mine. As for the rest, he kept it hidden so well that I am afraid to inquire.”

I bit my lips and twirled my mustache, rather disdainfully indeed, if I say so myself. Damn, but my boy knew me so well! Then I waved for my cousin to continue.

After a bit of truthfully retold squabbling, we came to “‘The two Musketeers with whom we have already made acquaintance, and who answered to the last of these three names, immediately quitted the group of which they had formed a part, and advanced toward the cabinet, the door of which closed after them as soon as they had entered. Their appearance, although it was not quite at ease, excited by its carelessness, at once full of dignity and submission, the admiration of d'Artagnan.’” Here Athos paused and looked at me until he was certain that he had all of my attention. “Ahem, d’Artagnan,” he recommenced, “‘who beheld in these two men **demigods** , and in their leader an **Olympian Jupiter** , armed with all his thunderbolts,’” he finished quickly and exclaimed, “Oh, for Hera’s cunt and tits!”

“Well, he’s off base, isn’t he?” I tried to play it off. “Neither one of the two of us was the actual demigod. So ha ha!”

“Oh, really?” Athos jeered. “So, you’re fine with this?” He flipped to another installment of _Le Siècle_ and read from it. “‘Notwithstanding all the pains he took, d'Artagnan was unable to learn any more concerning his three new-made friends. He formed, therefore, the resolution of believing for the present all that was said of their past, hoping for more certain and extended revelations in the future’. Incidentally,” my cousin remarked, as an aside, “at least he makes d’Artagnan sound like a right wanker - which he was at that age!” He resumed, “‘In the meanwhile, he looked upon Athos as an Achilles, Porthos as an Ajax, and Aramis as a Joseph.’ Now, how are you enjoying being compared to Ajax?”

“Ajax was a mortal,” I wrinkled my nose. “But a great warrior. My son loves me!”

“Ajax was the grandson of Zeus!” my cousin fumed, downing his glass.

“Calm down, cool your tits there, Discord! Not everyone can keep as good track of genealogy as you can.” I shifted uncomfortably on the couch. “You’re just pissy that he conflated you with Achilles. Rumor had it about the two of you…”

“Be quiet, you prat! I eradicated that rumor!”

“Blimey,” I muttered to myself. It appeared that my boy had walked in on some kind of a Trojan land mine. I needed to deploy distraction maneuvers. “By the way, where is your worse half?” I asked. Bringing up Aramis always took my cousin’s mind off other things. Like, killing my son (and possibly grandson), in this instance.

“Fucking the white fairy, probably,” Athos shrugged. I was a bit disappointed he hadn’t questioned my calling Aramis his “worse half.”

“Your Dad’s balls,” I muttered. “What is this? The 1620’s all over again with you two?”

“No, it’s not like that.” Athos looked rather uncomfortable again. “He… He’s been angry at me. I don’t even think he _wants_ to be fucking her. He just feels he owes me one, most likely.”

“For what?” I scratched my head.

Truthfully, I had been suspicious of Aramis for quite some time. Maybe the blood-guzzler was never exactly the nicest guy to pal about with, but anyone could see he went through something, something so terrible that it had altered him. I had been angry at myself at the time for not realizing what had happened sooner - that Athos was dead. Had I known, I would’ve found my way back from Haiti, and taken better care of the poor, lost revenant. He needed someone to look after him, but his lover was gone, I had been presumed dead as well, and his only other friend - the Rohan nymph - had declared it open hunting season on him and the rest of supernaturals. No wonder the kid lost his head (and never quite reattached it properly).

“I… it’s… Marie,” Athos stammered. I’ve never seen him so flustered before. “I’ve been… We’ve been… Together.”

“Cousin!” I leapt from the cushioning grasp of the couch and threw my arms around him. “I’m so happy for you! You’re finally no longer a virgin!”

“You… you did not just say that…” he muttered into my chest as I clutched him to me. I pressed him more tightly into my arms, until he could contradict me no longer.

***

“ _All for one, one for all! All for one, one for all!_ ” The screech from a dozen urchin throats rattled in the air and rang in my ears.

“Where in the name of Richelieu’s desiccated balls did they get that obnoxious war cry from?” Marion sneered, narrowing her eyes as she glanced out of the coach window.

“D’Artagnan,” I said, fanning myself against the odours that rose from the streets of Paris and against the bad taste that the ubiquitous presence of the obnoxious novel and its obnoxious protagonists left on my tongue. “ _Overcome by example, grumbling to himself, nevertheless, Porthos stretched out his hand, and the four friends repeated with one voice the formula dictated by d’Artagnan: ‘All for one, one for all.’”_ I quoted. “That’s the only instance their so-called ‘motto’ ever appears in the book, and yet it’s spread among the plebs like the pox.”

“And d’Artagnan is to blame.”

“As usual. At least he’s consistent.”

“I wonder: does he irritate you more or does Aramis?”

“It’s a close call.” I snapped my fan shut and then opened it again and moved it slowly in front of my face. “I must confess that Aramis is barely irritating at all in the book.”

“I’m not surprised. He loves Marie Michon very much.”

“Pah!” I turned my face towards the window and we continued in silence for a while. “I wonder how much of it is true, though,” I admitted after a while. “How much did Alex make up? How much did he steal? _Aramis uttered a cry of joy at the sight of the seal, kissed the superscription with an almost religious respect, and opened the epistle…_ I wonder if this is true.”

Marion grinned. “You know suspiciously many passages by heart, chérie.”

“The author’s son is my lover.” I brushed her face with the tips of the ostrich feathers. “You have no idea how often I listened to him reading me his dear papa’s work. He promised to write a novel one day to, ah, immortalise me, like the musketeers were immortalised.” I laughed.

“That is very good of him.”

“Indeed.”

“I’m sure he did love you,” Marion said after another pause.

“You’re meddling, fairy.”

“Suit yourself.” She took my hand and trailed her thumb across the exposed skin on the inside of my wrist. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember the way he looked at you just before he put that tongue of his to good use.”

“Pah!” I repeated and pulled my hand back. “Stop it, you evil sorceress.”

“You’re excited.” She leaned back in her seat and nudged my foot with hers. “How long has it been since you last saw him?”

“Not long enough.”

“Two hundred years?”

“I’m serious, stop it!”

“Here we are. Place Royale.” The coach slowed, and I took a deep breath. “You look utterly regal, chérie. Just… don’t stab him by accident.”

***

“Which cravat?” Aramis asked and I grinned at him from ear to ear.

“Trying to intimidate your foe with your sartorial savvy, flittermouse?”

“Don’t irritate me. It will be difficult enough just to make my way down to that park without eating the neighbor.”

“I believe he’s a friend of M. Dumas’,” I smiled, picking out the cravat and helping my beloved tie it around his neck, but not until I made a rosey bruise blossom on his skin before hiding it beneath the layers of silk. “A convenient midnight snack for chyortik.”

“You are a monster, you realize?” Aramis turned in my arms and his eyes glowed with a fierce flame. “I will not speak to her directly,” he declared with charming petulance.

Behind me, a Porthosian clearing of the throat announced to me that we were no longer alone.

“Come,” I took Aramis by the arm and conducted him towards the door, so that the three of us could descend the stairs together and attend to our rendez-vous. “It isn’t very sporting to make a lady wait, even if the ladies in question are not actual _ladies_.”

“Because they are supernatural beings or because they’re courtesans?” Porthos chuckled and I cast him a look of disapprobation to the extent possible, all things considered (that he had a point).

That we were meeting again at Place Royale to have a very awkward conversation was not a fact that escaped me. Still, it was decided that a meeting should take place in public and in broad daylight, so as to minimize any chance of people dropping suddenly or clumsily dead. And the canopy of the linden trees would provide welcome coverage from the sun, thus keeping Aramis’ shadow in check (the wily nymph had thought of everything).

We saw the two women approach. Instinctively, Porthos smoothed down his mustache, Aramis elongated his spine to his fullest height, and I pressed myself against the tree trunk, part of me wishing I was not there to witness any of it at all. The dryads, however, did not part the bark to welcome me. Instead, I bowed, and doubtlessly moved by my example, Aramis and Porthos bowed as well.

“Thank you for coming,” I said. “I think we can all agree that we have some rather important business to discuss. And I’m hoping, at least for right now, that we can all remember that we are scions of the gods and behave with comportment.”

“Not all of us,” Marie smiled and I heard Aramis’ fangs drop behind my back.

“You,” I pointed to the nymph, “Stand aside there.” I pointed to a tree. Marie gasped in feigned shock but pressed her back against a leafy linden. “And you, sir,” I pointed to my beloved, “against that one over there. Do not make me tie the two of you up.” They both snarled at me like wolves on a hunt, but did not move from their designated spots. “Well then, if you insist on acting like children, you shall be treated as such!”

Porthos’ eyes darted from me to Aramis to Marie, with an occasional pause to study Marion, and then back to myself. If I could offer a guess at the workings of his mind, I would say that he thought I was losing my mind completely.

“We’re here to discuss the author,” Marion took a step forward, “Who is our common enemy. Let us remember that, for the moment, we are all friends.”

“If only Aramis still had that diamond cross,” Porthos suddenly declared. “You remember, Athos? You made us all swear upon it, and Aramis did not eat d’Artagnan at all, even though he really, really wanted to.”

I blushed furiously, my mind racing with remembrances of that night, the heat of the argument, and the heated declarations that followed. Falling in love again, falling in a heap of limbs on the floor, careless of anything other than each other.

“That cross is gone,” I responded, since I could tell that Aramis too had been lost somewhere in the land of his memories. “It fell to the ground in Locmaria. I was holding it in my hand when I died and I haven’t seen it since.”

I ventured a glimpse towards Aramis, who silently bit his lips and averted his eyes.

“Was anyone else with you when you died?” Porthos inquired.

“Yes. D’Artagnan.”

My words were greeted with a vicious half-snarl, half-laugh from Aramis, and a fit of giggles from Marie.

“Oh, good old d’Artagnan!” the nymph laughed and fanned herself languidly. “He must have had it on him when I kicked him in his family jewels at your tomb, Athos.”

“You were at his tomb,” Aramis’ face turned ashen.

“You… kicked him in the balls?” I squinted.

“I was upset. And he was being very rude,” the nymph pronounced. Aramis laughed.

“Well, at least that is something the two of you can agree on!” I threw up my hands and accepted the small victory.

“Can we get back to talking about my boy?” Porthos redirected and several heads nodded in accord. “I have read the book. Well, Athos read the book to me. And quite frankly, I think it’s rather good!”

“It is quite charming, if whimsical!” the nymph supplied.

“It is preposterous and has plot holes!” the fairly declared.

“We are not here to debate the literary qualities of Dumas’ novel,” I reminded them, “I, for one, do not give a toss about how dull or charming you find my… _his_... his prose! The question is: what do we do about the little thief?”

“You know where I stand,” Aramis finally spoke, barely separating himself from the nature’s barrier against which he leaned. “We have killed men for far less. We find where he’s keeping your memoirs, destroy them, and then kill him before he exposes us even more than he already has.”

“He has not yet exposed anything!” Porthos protested. “Everyone thinks it’s made-up, right? And certainly no one thinks it’s about immortals!”

“It only takes one hunter!” Marion fumed. “Byron mentioned swans that one time, and remember what happened to Cycnus!” I shuddered at the recollection.

“Fie, my blood-thirsty fairy!” Marie ruffled her dress like a swan herself. “As much as _some_ of you may have hated d’Artagnan, keeping a human pet was good for you. It forced you to control your natural tendencies. It kept you closer to humanity. What use is destroying a man so gifted, when you can befriend him and keep him close instead?”

“To what end?” Aramis sneered.

“You can make sure that he only writes what you want him to write, and not whatever whimsy crosses his mind,” Marie suggested, almost demurely.

“That is a risk we cannot take!” Marion protested. “If I had not been in Faerie all of last spring, I would have murdered him myself, half-way through the novel.”

“So, before he got to all that boring La Rochelle stuff?”

“Porthos, concentrate!”

“He’s my son!” The Titan puffed out his chest. “You reminded us that we are all sons of deities, well he is a grandson of a deity. He’s your family too, Athos. Since when do we kill our own?”

“Well…” I almost went down quite a twisted path of the tales of the Olympian Pantheon, but, luckily, my beloved came to my rescue.

“Since they expose our secrets and risk all our existences?” Aramis asked in his sweetest voice.

“As if the demon needs a _reason_ to eat a man!” the nymph proclaimed and then bit her tongue demonstratively upon beholding my scathing look.

“This arguing is not getting us anywhere,” I shook my head, attempting to be the voice of reason, when my own heart was of two opinions. “We must put this to a vote.” I pointed at the fairy first. “Marion, how do you vote: life or death?”

“Death,” the Dame blanche spoke with a calm and collected voice.

“Marie?”

“Life!” The nymph proclaimed with a petulant look towards Marion.

“Aramis?”

“Death,” the flittermouse replied, with a well-practiced facsimile of boredom.

“And Porthos, I presume you vote life?”

“Hades’ balls!” Porthos pronounced.

“That’s two to two.”

“What about your vote?” Marie smiled. “Did you count yourself out, count?”

My head pounded and I rocked upon the balls of my feet as if hoping for a shift of divination to come from above or beneath me. “I’m… undecided.”

“You’re the tie-breaker,” Aramis dropped the bored facade and looked at me with unveiled aggravation. “You cannot be undecided. You have to decide. Life or death?”

“It cannot all come down to what I think!” I protested.

“It appears that it does,” Marion too sounded exasperated. Porthos’ eyes pleaded for mercy. Aramis’ teeth gleamed in the shade of the linden tree like diamonds. Marie fanned herself with detached determination. “Decide, Discord!”

“No,” I said. “I will not make this decision lightly, and certainly not today.”

“What do you propose?” Aramis asked, his eyebrows raised in a display of doubt and disappointment.

I sighed. “I’ll have to meet him.”

“Fabulous!” Marie exclaimed, closing her fan. “I undertake to arrange it.”

Marion rolled her eyes with undisguised disgust. “Aramis, be a dear, and escort me home?” My beloved’s feral grin as he offered her his arm told me all I needed to know.

“Porthos,” I whispered, “if you can make yourself inconspicuous, I’d keep an eye on your son in the meantime.” The Titan tapped his nose and shook my hand, taking leave quickly, and leaving me alone with Marie under the linden trees. “Well,” I said, “That went… about as poorly as I expected.”

“Don’t let them eat the Titling, Athos,” Marie beamed from under her long lashes. “He’s witty and full of the very definition of joie de vivre. I think you will like him when you meet him.”

“Enough about Alex,” I waved those thoughts away like the pestering gnat that they were. “Now that you’ve seen him, tell me, Marie - is there really no way that the two of you can make peace?”

“Your little beast of the Carpathian forests?” she laughed. “Surely, Athos, you don’t think he would ever feel contrition for the way he’s treated me? Because I want him to accept his penance willingly.”

“Aramis can be very good at playing the penitent when it suits him,” I retorted. “The two of you may have forgotten, but I still remember. He loved you, Marie, and you loved him. For centuries. It is only the merest leap from hatred back to love. If you had been indifferent towards him, then I would say ‘This is it. There is no hope in trying.’ But you hate him, passionately, which makes me believe you are capable of loving him passionately again.”

“You are the most peculiar of the Gods,” she smiled and placed her little hand into mine. “I have given this considerable thought.” I leaned closer and brought my ear against her lips, so she could whisper her desires to me.

***

“The vampyre really agreed to it?”

“The vampyre did.” I patted the front of my bodice and shook out my petticoats of blood-red satin.

“He must feel very guilty.” Marion curled up on the chaise-longue like a large cat. “That, or Discord employed Olympian mind games to render him compliant.”

“Discord would never stoop so low.”

“You have a very high opinion of him.” Marion yawned daintily. “I envy you, Marie. It’s going to be a magnificent spectacle. I wish I was invited.”

“You had the pleasure to witness him getting guillotined,” I reminded her.

Marion merely smiled. “Take care of your dress, Marie.”

“That’s why I put on this one. The blood won’t show.”

The Hôtel de Rohan-Guémené held many memories. They descended upon me like a loft of doves when I stepped out of the coach and walked towards the door. My life as Marie de Rohan had been one of the most memorable of my eventful human existence – and, due to the thieving demon, it had also been one of the longest.

The concierge opened the door and I swept past her, pulling my hood over my face. Brass sconces along the staircase held thick wax candles, and shadows streaked into corners, where the golden light did not penetrate. The Olympian Grigori stood at the top of the stairs with a candlestick in his hand. His face was pale and English and showed no emotions whatsoever as he bowed his head in greeting and stepped aside to let me pass. He conducted me along the corridor, past rooms that had once belonged to my long-extinct family. The House of Rohan had fallen, like all human houses were doomed to fall, and for a moment, a wave of regret washed over me. In the boards beneath my feet, in the creaks in the walls, I looked for traces of him: Hercule de Rohan, my last human father, whom I had loved and mourned like a true daughter.

The Grigori stopped by a door, and I looked back. Across the corridor lived the author of _Marion Delorme_ , whose favourite daughter had tragically drowned only a year ago, dragging her young husband to his death with her.

The door opened. I stepped in. The door closed.

I beheld the altar.

Aramis was sitting on the delicately embroidered counterpane of Aegean blue that covered the bed, his hair like polished ebony, framing the pearly white face. He sat motionless, watching me from behind the mask of alabaster with eyes that were aglow with the fires of Lucifer. A white shirt was draped around his slim frame, the collar falling open around his throat and neck.

“Good evening, Marie.” Athos glided in soundlessly from behind a folding screen. He wore a dressing gown and the smile of Discord. “Can I tempt you with a glass of wine?” He held it out to me, and I took it without thinking and took a sip. My mouth was dry.

“Please take a seat,” my gracious host continued, taking my hand and leading me to an armchair. I shrugged off my cloak, and he picked it off my shoulders with a delicate, tender gesture.

“Is there anything else you need?” Athos asked with a smile curled firmly in the corners of his mouth. “No? Very well. We shall begin.”

He stepped away from me, and I breathed. Suffused with the heat and scent of church candles, the air pressed like a corporeal entity against my skin.

With his back turned to me, Athos sank down to his knees and cupped the demon’s face with both hands. He tilted his head to kiss his lover, who still resembled a statue of alabaster. Athos’ hands trailed down, stirring Aramis’ hair, smoothing down his shoulders, the length of his arms, down to his hips, and then he parted his thighs and slotted between them with a predatory jolt of his hips. He turned his head to look back at me, and I saw his eyes and his mouth glitter.

“You can watch there.” He nodded his head towards the cheval glass at the foot of the bed. “I believe the angle is convenient.”

I sank back in my chair, heat rising around and within me. Before my eyes, the scene unfolded that had been devised to propitiate me and quell my righteous wrath: Athos’ dressing gown slipped down his shoulders, his back, revealing the elegant curve of his spine, the long flanks, the slim hips. That arse that I’d once fucked.

Aramis groaned.

I hadn’t noticed what had elicited that reaction, for Athos’ body was in the way, but when I changed my position and turned my head, the perspective changed: in the mirror, I saw Aramis’ profile, eyes closed and his mouth open to the kisses of Discord.

They fell on the bed together, Athos arched above the demon, taut and dangerous like a bowstring, while Aramis’ legs opened and then tightened around his hips. The soft murmur of voices reached me as they whispered and cursed into each other’s skin. Another groan, a gasp, and they rolled over, Aramis straddling the nude body of his favourite deity with the dexterity of a master horseman.

“Turn around.” Athos’ voice was husky with lust. “With your face to the mirror.”

I saw Aramis tense, but he complied, spun round, looked up, and our eyes met in the mirror. His pearly skin was flushed and his eyes burned like the pitch in the deepest pit of Hell. Athos sat up, pulled Aramis’ shirt over his head and flung it aside. He slung his arm around Aramis’ ribcage; the long cords of muscles and tendons, the dark hairs on his forearm in stark contrast to the lily-white skin of Aramis’ chest. He was watching Aramis’ face in the mirror, and Aramis was watching me.

“Go on,” I mouthed at them.

Athos leaned in and licked his lover’s ear. “On your knees,” he ordered.

I saw Aramis’ eyes flash, and for a moment it looked as if the demon would put up a fight. But Athos’ mouth alighted on his shoulder, lips and teeth parted, and Aramis moved, smooth and sleek like a serpent, crouching on his hands and knees, and Athos was pulling his trousers down his hips and legs.

And then, Aramis moaned, his eyes open wide in shock. Athos’ hands on his hips, fingers curled around the bones there, and Athos’ face pushing between his legs from behind. I _heard_ Discord lick at him with soft, filthy sounds. I could tell when the swipes of his tongue turned deeper, more urgent; when he thrust his tongue into Aramis’ arse to fuck him open for his cock.

The demon lay splayed on his front, clinging to the edge of the bed with claw-like fingers and white knuckles. He panted, harsh gusts of air forced out of his lungs with each shove of Athos’ mouth and tongue. The fire of his gaze tarnished the silver of the mirror, and I couldn’t look away.

Behind him, Athos moved. He pushed himself up, the muscles of his arms and shoulders bulging as he heaved himself over the shaking body of his demon. His long fingers dipped into the grooves between Aramis’ ribs, scratches criss-crossed Aramis’ white skin under the pressure of Athos’ nails. He threaded his fingers through Aramis’ hair and pulled his head back. “Look at yourself.”

The scent of almonds wafted over when Athos began to pour oil over Aramis’ loins, into the cleft of his arse, massaging it in with deft fingers, until the demon groaned, open-mouthed. Discord kissed his shoulder tenderly, knelt up and fucked himself into Aramis’ arse, watching my face in the mirror. He stilled once his hips were flush against the swell of Aramis loins.

“Like this?” he asked.

Aramis groaned and gritted his teeth.

“More,” I commanded.

“But of course,” Athos said. He draped himself over his lover’s form and weaved his fingers through Aramis’. The demon’s slender hips arched up, his spine curved like a cat’s, and an expression of bone-shattering ecstasy melted his features. They fucked in slow, thorough thrusts, my presence forgotten for a few moments of unbridled bliss, until Aramis turned his head and caught my gaze in the mirror. His lips were bitten red, revealing the diamond glitter of his fangs. He pushed himself up, arms taut, elbows bent, like a panther ready to strike, and shoved his arse into Athos’ groin.

Suddenly, they both moved. Athos pulled back, dragging Aramis behind, until the god was sitting with the demon in his lap, impaling him on his huge cock. They moved again, legs thrown over the edge of the bed for better purchase, bracing themselves against the mattress, against each other, and I could almost, _almost_ see Athos cock disappear in his lover’s arse. Aramis, staring at me with eyes like burning coals, lifted Athos’ hand from his chest to his mouth. His lips parted, his teeth gleamed, and then Athos threw back his head as voracious fangs drilled themselves deep into his wrist. So used were they to this aspect of love-making that they rhythm didn’t falter; only a thin rivulet of blood ran down Athos’ forearm, saturating the air with its divine fragrance.

Aramis let go of Athos’ wrist and trailed his agile tongue across his glistening lips. He drew his legs together, emulating the waves of the tide as he undulated his hips. But the Olympian flame lit up Discord’s eyes. He leaned back for balance and hooked his hands under Aramis’ thighs, pulling them up and apart while he drove his god-cock deep into the demon’s arse. The thick length of flesh glistened wetly with oil, ploughing the stretched hole, pounding it open, baring him to my view, until Aramis’ head rolled back, his neck, his stomach tautened, and he shot semen all over his chest. Beneath him, Athos stiffened and groaned, clutching Aramis to him with both arms, and his cock twitched, forcing his release out and into Aramis’ arse. They lay, panting, arms and legs entwined, and I struggled to get my breath back and stop my head spinning.

At last, I pulled my hand out from beneath my petticoats, sucked in my fingers and licked them with slow swirls of my tongue. On the bed, the god and demon stirred. Whispers again, and I couldn’t make out the words, but there was soft laughter and the sated, purring murmur of the well and truly fucked.

I rose from the chair, shook out my dress and walked over to the bed. Aramis’ eyes were glowing embers, while Athos’ half-lidded gaze grazed my face as he stroked Aramis’ chest and arms with a lazy hand.

I leaned in and dipped my fingertips into the puddle on the demon’s skin. He showed me his blood-stained teeth in a snarl, but there was no ferocity to it.

I lifted my hand to his face and drew the sign of the cross on his forehead. “Ego te absolvo.”

For a moment, the infernal light of Lucifer flashed in his eyes again. Then, he snorted. Beside, beneath him, Athos shook with laughter. I wanted to kiss Discord’s mouth, but the truce was too fragile yet. The demon’s sacrifice was appreciated, and, unlike the volatile Hellenic gods, I did not seek to mock and pervert it.

I picked up my cloak and floated towards the door. There, I turned around. “Come and see me soon,” I told the lovers. “My camellias will always be white for you.” I winked at them and departed with a rustle of my skirts.

**Author's Note:**

> We've been waiting for this moment since last June and it feels _great_. Do you feel great? Tell us how you feel! And don't forget to check out all the bonus content on our [blog](http://arathos.tumblr.com/)!


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